Bug#594967: grub-pc: GRUB Hangs After "Welcome to GRUB!"

[Steve McIntyre]

On Mon, Aug 30, 2010 at 07:50:56PM -0500, David A. Greene wrote:
>Package: grub-pc
>Version: 1.98+20100804-2
>Severity: critical
>Tags: d-i
>Justification: breaks the whole system
>
>This problem originally happened when upgrading an old Squeeze installation.
>I do not know how long the problem has existed.  Doing a fresh install from the
>very latest testing images does not solve the problem.
>
>On an Acer Aspire One AO751h, GRUB fails to boot.  It hangs at "Welcome to GRUB!"
>and a Ctl-Alt-Del does not reboot the machine.  I have tried multiple installation
>methods and partitioning schemes with no luck.

On Sat, Nov 20, 2010 at 10:38:03AM +0000, Steve McIntyre wrote:
>On Thu, Sep 16, 2010 at 03:29:43PM -0500, Matt Zagrabelny wrote:
>>Not sure what else, besides the subject, would be of use for debugging.
>>
>>I did follow Nuutti Kotivuori's <naked at iki.fi> suggestion of uncommenting:
>>
>>#GRUB_TERMINAL=console
>>
>>in /etc/default/grub
>>
>>reran update-grub2
>>
>>and was able to boot into the system. Let me know what else I can do
>>to help debug this.
>
>I'm seeing the same problem on an Acer 0751H machine as well, on a
>fresh squeeze installation. I used to have (and rely on) a graphical
>grub to set up the right graphics mode on this Poulsbo machine, but
>that was from quite a while back using an Ubuntu-based system.
>
>I'll start bisecting now to see where this came in.

OK, done. I'm cc:ing all the people who have added comments on the bug
too, for information.

On the Acer 0751H here, I've walked through the versions of grub-pc
available on snapshot.debian.org to see where things broke. The answer
is that the break happened between 20100617-1 and 20100702-1. Using
the text console workaround will let you use grub as-is, but if you
want graphical goodness too (and the smarts to make the Poulsbo
chipset work at a proper resolution), then download and install the
following older versions for now:

http://snapshot.debian.org/archive/debian/20100619T041712Z/pool/main/g/grub2/grub-common_1.98%2B20100617-1_i386.deb
http://snapshot.debian.org/archive/debian/20100619T041712Z/pool/main/g/grub2/grub-pc_1.98%2B20100617-1_i386.deb

and you should be fine. You'll need to mark those packages as "held"
to stop apt(itude) upgrading beyond them as well, of course. I hope
that's helpful for people. :-)

Now, looking at the changes from 20100617-1 to 20100702-1. There's a
big obvious candidate for the issue we're seeing:

  * New Bazaar snapshot.
    - Use video functions in Linux loader rather than hardcoding UGA; load
      all available video backends (closes: #565576, probably).

I'm not sure exactly what changed in there and I don't have time right
now to dig much further, but it's worth sharing where I got to.

-- 
Steve McIntyre, Cambridge, UK.                                steve at einval.com
"Further comment on how I feel about IBM will appear once I've worked out
 whether they're being malicious or incompetent. Capital letters are forecast."
 Matthew Garrett, http://www.livejournal.com/users/mjg59/30675.html