Bug#544155: [grub-pc] grub update renders system unbootable (unaligned pointer 0x700ba)

Martin Steigerwald Martin at lichtvoll.de
Sat Aug 29 13:16:40 UTC 2009


Am Samstag 29 August 2009 schrieben Sie:
> > Then I booted into grml, overwrote the swap partition and recreated
> > it via mkswap in order to make sure the TuxOnIce snapshot is
> > invalidated to avoid data loss in next boot.
> >
> > Then I chrooted to my debian system after bind mounting /dev, /proc,
> > /sys to it, downgraded grub-pc to 1.96+20090317-1 from squeeze and
> > ran grub- install.
> >
> > I thought about running grub-install for the grub-pc from unstable,
> > but I read the current sid version might be broken anyway[1], thus I
> > thought I'd better downgrade to the squeeze one in order to get a
> > working system quickly again. I could try updating to the sid one
> > again, without running grub-install manually and then I run it
> > manually and see whether it fixes the issue. So you could know
> > whether its grub itself or a missing grub- install.
>
> If grub-install doestn't get run then /boot/grub still has the old grub
> and so nothing actually changed, except if grub-mkconfig generates a
> different grub.cfg.

I tried grub-pc from unstable again and in fact it did run grub-install:

shambhala:~> aptitude -t unstable install grub-pc
Paketlisten werden gelesen... Fertig             
Abhängigkeitsbaum wird aufgebaut                 
Lese Status-Informationen ein... Fertig          
Lese erweiterte Statusinformationen              
Initialisiere Paketstatus... Fertig              
Lese Task-Beschreibungen... Fertig               
Die folgenden Pakete werden aktualisiert:        
  grub-common grub-pc                            
2 Pakete aktualisiert, 0 zusätzlich installiert, 0 werden entfernt und 
1311 nicht aktualisiert.
Muss 0B/1861kB an Archiven herunterladen. Nach dem Entpacken werden 713kB 
zusätzlich belegt sein.
Wollen Sie fortsetzen? [Y/n/?]                                                                   
Schreibe erweiterte Statusinformationen... Fertig                                                
Reading package fields... Done                                                                   
Reading package status... Done                                                                   
Retrieving bug reports... Done                                                                   
Parsing Found/Fixed information... Done                                                          
grave bugs of grub-pc (1.96+20090317-1 -> 1.96+20090826-3) <tagged as 
pending a fix>             
 #543950 - grub-pc(GNU/kFreeBSD): wrong root fs type                                             
Summary:                                                                                         
 grub-pc(1 bug)                                                                                  
Are you sure you want to install/upgrade the above packages? [Y/n/?/...]                         
Lese Changelogs... Fertig                                                                        
Vorkonfiguration der Pakete ...                                                                  
(Lese Datenbank ... 386993 Dateien und Verzeichnisse sind derzeit 
installiert.)
Vorbereiten zum Ersetzen von grub-pc 1.96+20090317-1 (durch .../grub-
pc_1.96+20090826-3_i386.deb) ...
Entpacke Ersatz für grub-pc ...
Vorbereiten zum Ersetzen von grub-common 1.96+20090317-1 (durch .../grub-
common_1.96+20090826-3_i386.deb) ...
Entpacke Ersatz für grub-common ...
Verarbeite Trigger für man-db ...
Richte grub-common ein (1.96+20090826-3) ...
Installiere neue Version der Konfigurationsdatei /etc/grub.d/10_linux ...
Installiere neue Version der Konfigurationsdatei /etc/grub.d/00_header ...
Installiere neue Version der Konfigurationsdatei /etc/grub.d/30_os-prober 
...
Richte grub-pc ein (1.96+20090826-3) ...
Replacing config file /etc/default/grub with new version
Installation finished. No error reported.
This is the contents of the device map /boot/grub/device.map.
Check if this is correct or not. If any of the lines is incorrect,
fix it and re-run the script `grub-install'.

(hd0)   /dev/sda
Generating grub.cfg ...
Found Debian background: moreblue-orbit-grub.png
Found linux image: /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.31-rc7-tp42-toi-3.0.1-04741-g57e61c0
Found initrd image: /boot/initrd.img-2.6.31-rc7-tp42-toi-3.0.1-04741-
g57e61c0
Found linux image: /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.30-1-686
Found initrd image: /boot/initrd.img-2.6.30-1-686
Found linux image: /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.29.6-tp42-toi-3.0.1-01085-gf325e4a
Found initrd image: /boot/initrd.img-2.6.29.6-tp42-toi-3.0.1-01085-
gf325e4a
Found linux image: /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.26-2-686
Found initrd image: /boot/initrd.img-2.6.26-2-686
Warning: update-grub_lib is deprecated, use grub-mkconfig_lib instead
Found memtest86 image: /boot/memtest86.bin
Warning: update-grub_lib is deprecated, use grub-mkconfig_lib instead
Found memtest86+ image: /boot/memtest86+.bin
done
[ Rootkit Hunter version 1.3.4 ]
File updated: searched for 155 files, found 135
Paketlisten werden gelesen... Fertig
Abhängigkeitsbaum wird aufgebaut
Lese Status-Informationen ein... Fertig
Lese erweiterte Statusinformationen
Initialisiere Paketstatus... Fertig
Lese Task-Beschreibungen... Fertig

Aktueller Status: 1311 Aktualisierungen [-2].
shambhala:~>


Still it gave the unaligned pointer error on boot. With all kernels listed 
above, including the two stock debian kernels.

It gives

unaligned pointer 0x700ba

with linux and

unaligned pointer 0xe274

with linux16.

I even did a manual grub-install /dev/sda via grml, but this did not fix 
it. This is as I expected, since according to above output grub-install 
has been run in post-instrall script already.

A downgrade to grub-pc from squeeze resolved this issue.

Thus my conclusion is currently, that grub-pc unstable does not work at 
all on my ThinkPad T42. And since I am pretty sure that my previous 
working version was from unstable as well I think the problem has been 
introduced quite recently. It was an automatic update and according to my 
pinning these don't happen from squeeze to sid, but only from squeeze to 
squezee or sid to sid ;).

Ciao,
-- 
Martin 'Helios' Steigerwald - http://www.Lichtvoll.de
GPG: 03B0 0D6C 0040 0710 4AFA  B82F 991B EAAC A599 84C7
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 197 bytes
Desc: This is a digitally signed message part.
URL: <http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/pkg-grub-devel/attachments/20090829/d137da83/attachment.pgp>


More information about the Pkg-grub-devel mailing list