On Sat, Nov 21 2020 at 05:04:30 PM, "Martin McCormick" <marti...@suddenlink.net> wrote: > Felix Miata <mrma...@earthlink.net> writes: >> Save yourself many keystrokes by using the symlinks in the root directory >> instead >> of the long-winded full version-named /boot/vmlinuz-4.19.0-5-686-pae.... > > This is wonderful to know and in the root or / directory of this > disk, there is > initrd.img, initrd.img.old, vmlinuz and vmlinuz.old > > Those all point to valid targets. I presently have the > no-boot disk mounted on a working linux system where it's root > directory is /dev/sde1 and the current links plus the old links > are as follows: > > lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 32 Jun 26 2019 initrd.img -> > boot/initrd.img-4.19.0-5-686-pae > lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 31 Jun 26 2019 initrd.img.old -> > boot/initrd.img-4.9.0-9-686-pae > lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 29 Jun 26 2019 vmlinuz -> > boot/vmlinuz-4.19.0-5-686-pae > lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 28 Jun 26 2019 vmlinuz.old -> > boot/vmlinuz-4.9.0-9-686-pae > > I finally have found something that may be a clue to > what's actually wrong. While trying to manually make that drive > boot, I got this: > > grub rescue> set prefix=(hd0,1)//boot/grub > grub rescue> insmodnormal > Unknown command `insmodnormal'. > > That was a good old syntax error so I tried > > insmod normal with a space > grub rescue> insmod normal > error: symbol `grub_calloc' not found. > > I'm pretty sure that shouldn't happen at all and is > what's behind the failure to boot. > > I haven't found any uuid's that are different although I > first thought I had as I looked at some links which had uuid's > but they were good when I looked at the actual partition. It's > easy to go down a rabbit hole if one doesn't watch out. > > I think there may be something about grub that got left > out or changed during the upgrade. >
There was a recent update to grub that was reported to cause the grub_calloc symbol error. As I remember it, the problem is because of a mismatch between the grub binaries and the grub modules. Reinstalling grub using the grub-install command fixes it. For details, bug report is https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=966575 -- regards, kushal
