Thanks for testing this out! You have narrowed it down to the grub loader. Now for the critical difference between the two grubs... The Ubuntu grub has a lot of Ubuntu changes patched in, I don't know about the Mandriva one. No surprise they have different file size, they are compiled in different environments anyway. The Ubuntu patches deal with both stage1 and stage2, so I guess that's why you can not mix stage files. And yes, the 17 vs 15 sectors is just the filesize/512 rounded up.
Since both of you have ICH7, it's tempting to believe that the corruption is due to the way grub accesses the disk and that something in that chipset triggers the problem. However AFAIK grub just uses BIOS calls and doesn't care about hardware details, unless there is something with disk geometry - which should be only disk-specific. I've got ICH7 myself, without problems. Can you all please post lspci output and your menu.lst? ** Changed in: grub (Ubuntu) Sourcepackagename: dmraid => grub ** Summary changed: - ALERT! does not exist at boot with fakeraid + "ALERT! does not exist" at boot with ICH7 -- "ALERT! does not exist" at boot with ICH7 https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/106887 You received this bug notification because you are a member of Ubuntu Bugs, which is the bug contact for Ubuntu. -- ubuntu-bugs mailing list ubuntu-bugs@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-bugs
