boot drops to grub prompt, disk error

[Joel Rees]

On Thu, Jun 29, 2017 at 5:10 PM, Karl Auer <kauer at biplane.com.au> wrote:
> On Thu, 2017-06-29 at 08:33 +0100, Colin Law wrote:
>> > It was working OK and then it stopped.
>> I suggest starting by unplugging the connectors to the discs and
>> reconnecting them. It is not unknown for a dodgy connection to give
>> intermittent operation and reseating them may repair the connection.
>
> Well, we'll try that. However, it's not intermittent in that sense. It
> ALWAYS fails into the grub menu, and ALWAYS successfully boots after the second "exit". The person concerned says it sometimes needs three "exits", but I've not seen it and he's not 100% certain of it.
>
> What puzzles me is the hd0/hd1 thing. How could hd1 appear if there is
> no second physical disk?
>
> I hope to have my actual hands on it tomorrow some time.
>

My son has a recent ASUS laptop which sometimes loses track of its (only) disk.

Internal connectors that are almost criminally shallow get knocked loose.

There's a brace over the connector, and I have to wonder whether the
brace ends up eating all the manufacturing savings from the shallow
connector. I don't think the brace is also a heatsink.

Which is to say, don't be surprised if modern hardware can't seem to
stay connected. Too many corners being cut to protect the entrenched
IP holders.

--
Joel Rees

One of these days I'll get someone to pay me
to design a language that combines the best of Forth and C.
Then I'll be able to leap wide instruction sets with a single #ifdef,
run faster than a speeding infinite loop with a #define,
and stop all integer size bugs with my bare cast.
http://defining-computers.blogspot.com/2017/06/reinventing-computers.html

More of my delusions:
http://reiisi.blogspot.com/2017/05/do-not-pay-modern-danegeld-ransomware.html
http://reiisi.blogspot.jp/p/novels-i-am-writing.html