Greetings everyone, today I ran into a weird problem I can't get my head around. I run a debian 8 jessie server which was last updated around 4 weeks ago. I did an apt-get update/upgrade today which only involved around 20 packages, one of which was an update to the linux-image-3.16.0-4-amd64 package.
The server has a 2009 asus mainboard which is not uefi capable. It is booted via a 120MB bios_grub type gpt partition and the system resides on the following 2TB ext4 partition. Rebooting after the upgrade led to grub immediately reporting: error: invalid arch independent ELF magic. grub rescue> I then tried to use the rescue prompt to get the system to boot manually. I set the root to (hd0,gpt2) and was able to use ls to navigate to the grub folder. Upon issuing an insmod linux grub immediately responded with: error: invalid arch independent ELF magic. I get the same error if I for example try to insmod configfile or a couple other modules. the modules gzio, part_gpt and ext2 work fine! I then proceeded to boot a grml rescue image from a usb stick and after mounting the root filesystem and taking care of the sys,dev,proc folders I chrooted into the mounted root filesystem and did a: grub-install /dev/sda The grub installation went fine, no errors and after a reboot I did get back the grub boot menu. However trying to boot the first entry which contains the 3.16 kernel image grub responds with: error: invalid magic number. Loading initial ramdisk... error: you need to lead the kernel first If I try to boot the old 3.2 kernel which I still had on that root filesystem instead I can boot the system just fine. I can repeat this behaviour as many times as I want. Doing a grub-install from my booted system leads to the invalid arch message and no way to boot anything. Booting a rescue disk and doing another grub-install gets my system back to the grub menu and I can at least boot the old 3.2 kernel. rinse repeat. After spending more than 10 hours so far on the issue I still don't know what exactly is causing this behaviour. It can't really be an uefi issue as this mainboard is not uefi capable. It has been running fine in legacy gpt mode since 2009. Also I am usure as to what the arch independent elf-magic error message means. And is that the same "magic" as the "invalid magic number" message I can achieve the other way? So, help me please, since I am running out of things to try. Best regards Alexander M. Heuer
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