[Bug 934614] Re: reinstall of precise breaks grub with invalid arch independent ELF magic

[John Johansen]

I haven't been able to replicate again either

I have done i386 and amd64, doing both with a erase-whole-disk, and
install along side windows, cycling through the different bios efi
options (efi, bios, bios first ..).

About the only thing left to try is installing an older release and then
doing a clean install over top

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Title:
  reinstall of precise breaks grub with invalid arch independent ELF
  magic

Status in “grub2” package in Ubuntu:
  Incomplete
Status in “grub2” source package in Precise:
  Incomplete

Bug description:
  I did an over the top install of precise without formatting the drive
  to preserve the home partition. I can now not boot the computer and
  can't reinstall grub.

  ubuntu at ubuntu:~$ mkdir target
  ubuntu at ubuntu:~$ sudo mount /dev/sda1 target
  ubuntu at ubuntu:~$ ls target/
  bin    etc             lib         lost+found  proc  selinux  usr
  boot   home            lib32       media       root  srv      var
  cdrom  initrd.img      lib64       mnt         run   sys      vmlinuz
  dev    initrd.img.old  libnss3.so  opt         sbin  tmp
  ubuntu at ubuntu:~$ sudo mount -o bind /proc target/proc
  ubuntu at ubuntu:~$ sudo mount -o bind /dev target/dev
  ubuntu at ubuntu:~$ sudo mount -o bind /sys target/sys
  ubuntu at ubuntu:~$ sudo chroot target
  root at ubuntu:/# grub-install /dev/sda
  Installation finished. No error reported.
  root at ubuntu:/# exit
  ubuntu at ubuntu:~$ 

  reboot, same error, grub rescue prompt with invalid arch independent
  ELF format.

  The computer was installed as 64bit 11.10, upgraded to 12.04 and
  updated frequently. I broke unity a bit and decided to try the full
  reinstall process from a live USB. The computer is a core i3 laptop,
  with a 320GB drive, default partitioning /dev/sda1 is big and all the
  data /dev/sda5 is swap. Installing precise 64bit from daily live CD
  image.

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