Bug#550702: grub-pc: Grub hangs after having ran Windows XP

[Felix Zielcke]

Am Montag, den 12.10.2009, 12:55 +0200 schrieb Emmanuel Gamby:
> Package: grub-pc
> Version: 1.97~beta3-1
> Severity: important
> 
> I have a laptop (HP/Compaq nc8430) with a dual (Linux/Windows XP
> Professional) boot. When I switch to Windows and try to reboot Linux
> afterwards, Grub hangs during the welcome message. I need to rerun
> grub-install from a live CD to be able to boot again into my system.
> 
> Dual boot worked like a charm with the previous version of Grub.
> Dual boot was automatically configured using os-prober.

So this happens only after booting Windows but not when you reboot from
Linux to Linux?
In that case something in your Windows is overwriting the embeding area
between MBR and first partition.
But strange that you didn't had this problem with GRUB Legacy.
It uses the same area too, except that it's stage1.5 is much smaller
then GRUB 2's core.img

Hm maybe try if booting into the Windows safe mode also causes this.

The only way we could fix this inside GRUB 2 would be to add an option
to grub-install to force the use of blocklists.
But we won't do that.
In fact we did it the other way, you need to use the --force option if
you really want them in case embeding isn't possible.

A workaround for you would be use the MBR code of the `mbr' package and
then install GRUB 2 to a bootsector instead of MBR and set the
boot/active flag on that partition.


-- 
Felix Zielcke
Proud Debian Maintainer and GNU GRUB developer