Bug#589737: Unknown symbol error in grub2 : 'grub_xputs'

[Geoffrey Thomas]

Hi maintainer and others,

I ran into this when installing Debian off the netboot kernel/initrd last 
night. I haven't attempted to reproduce the issue, but I think I ended up 
with GRUB being configured on my install media instead of my root disk, or 
something.

Specifically, I plugged a USB stick into an existing Wheezy system, 
formatted it and mounted /dev/sdc1 on /mnt/sdc, ran "grub-install 
--boot-directory=/mnt/sdc/boot /dev/sdc", and downloaded the netboot 
kernel and initrd from Wheezy "current" to it. (This all worked fine.) I 
started up the installer by booting the USB stick on my new system, and 
manually booting that kernel and initrd at the GRUB prompt.

I noticed during the installer that my USB stick was detected fairly early 
in d-i, but I needed to run the "Detect disks" phase to get my root disk 
(I also backed up the old disk contents via openssh-client-udeb, before 
letting d-i format or install anything, which is why I noticed). My USB 
stick was /dev/sda, and the root d/targetisk was /dev/sdb.

After installing and rebooting, I got the error mentioned in this bug when 
booting off my hard disk, whether or not my USB install stick was plugged 
in. If I plugged in my USB stick and booted from that, I got the menu I 
expected, offering to boot up the newly-installed system, and that booted 
fine. This is why I vaguely suspect some parts of GRUB got installed to my 
USB stick instead of to the hard disk.

`dpkg-reconfigure grub-pc` got GRUB installed right on my new system, so 
now it reboots fine.

If it's relevant, the old system (where I formatted the USB stick) was 
Wheezy amd64, and the new system was Wheezy i386.

I might try reproducing this in a VM, but hopefully this is enough data to 
be somewhat helpful.

-- 
Geoffrey Thomas
http://ldpreload.com
geofft at ldpreload.com