Bug#741464: grub-pc-bin: hangs after displaying boot menu

[Sven Joachim]

Control: retitle -1 grub-pc-bin: freezes after "terminal_input at_keyboard"

On 2014-10-13 16:25 +0200, Colin Watson wrote:

> On Wed, Mar 12, 2014 at 08:24:31PM +0100, Sven Joachim wrote:
>> After upgrading the grub packages and rebooting my laptop, grub
>> displayed the boot menu and then was hung.  The countdown before
>> booting the default kernel was not started and grub did not accept any
>> keyboard input.
>> 
>> I had to boot a rescue system from a USB stick, chroot into my
>> installation and downgrade to 2.00-22 to get back to a working system.
>
> Sorry for the delay in replying to this.  Could you please post the
> output of:
>
>   sudo debconf-show grub-pc
>
> ?  Is there anything else interesting about your system, since this is
> not something I can reproduce?

I have diverted /sbin/update-grub to maintain /boot/grub/grub.cfg by
hand, as you suggested in bug #578576.  Therefore the debconf data are
probably not too interesting.

> Bearing in mind the period of time
> involved, it might also be worth trying with 2.02~beta2-14 now that you
> have rescue media to hand.

I have managed to install 2.02~beta2-15 on a USB stick which is much
easier to recover, and the offending command which causes grub to freeze
is "terminal_input at_keyboard", which I have been using for obtaining a
German keyboard layout (see #686817 on that matter; I'm sure there was
an even older bug, but cannot find it now).  If I remove that statement,
grub works.  From the grub command line I can "insmod at_keyboard"
without problems, but "terminal_input at_keyboard" freezes grub.

Cheers,
       Sven