On Sat, 6 May 2017 09:49:49 +0200 Pascal Hambourg <pas...@plouf.fr.eu.org> wrote:
> Le 05/05/2017 à 23:39, Joe a écrit : > > > > lo and behold, I'm dropped to a grub rescue> prompt after the > > message in the subject line... > > > > I can list the (hd0,1)/boot/ directory, but insmod normal gives the > > illegal access message again. > > > > The Net mostly reckons this is due to using too large a drive on an > > old BIOS, but since this very drive has booted on this very > > computer many dozens of times, without change in the partition > > structure, that is not the case here. > > It can still be the case, but you may have been lucky until now if > GRUB files were written into the area accessible through the BIOS. > Then there was an upgrade which wrote the files outside this area. > > You can check the sizes of the disk and the partition as viewed by > GRUB with the following commands : > > ls (hd0) > ls (hd0,1) > The netbook is about seven years old, but the laptop is a two-year-old HP running Windows 8. Its hard drive is 500GB of which the Win partition is about 400GB. The USB hard drive is physically 120GB, with the single Linux partition being physically the first at just over 10GB. It is an i386 installation with all modules, specifically in order to boot on practically anything, and it does. The only computer I own which does not boot it is, not surprisingly, my ARM-based Raspberry Pi. At least, until yesterday's upgrade. I don't think it is a BIOS issue, the laptop and netbook architectures being utterly different, and the laptop being fairly new. Somehow, grub2 is reading a wildly inaccurate number from somewhere outside its own boot code, or possibly, the grub2 update and installation software has an obscure calculation bug. -- Joe
