On 2020-08-01 12:23 +0100, Graham Seaman wrote: > On 01/08/2020 07:50, Tom Dial wrote: >> I have a laptop that became unbootable because >> the initial loader failed to find a symbol (grub_calloc) and balked. >> Like the one mentioned here, it uses legacy boot. One explanation has it >> that this happened because the MBR and the remainder of grub were not >> both updated or were updated with slightly incompatible data. >> >> One fix appears to be to reinstall grub using a rescue CD or another >> system. That worked for me. > > My home server sits in my loft managing comms with the outside world; > yesterday it overheated (not a surprise) and went down.
You should probably open the machine up and clean it. :-) > On reboot > after cooling it came back up with the grub_calloc problem, so like > Tom I reinstalled after which it appears to be OK. > > BUT because I have no idea why the original problem occurred, or why a > reinstall fixed the problem, I have no idea if this is a permanent > fix, or if I have a system which is liable to fail to reboot again in > the future. Does anyone know? It's a very simple single drive system > with legacy boot. In this case the error is quite unlikely to occur, I have no idea why it happened for you in the first place. > I run it with security updates on auto, and check > for other updates manually once a week or so. Should I change this > pattern for a while while possible grub problems are sorted upstream? I would recommend to run "dpkg-reconfigure grub-pc". This should bring up three dialogues, the last of which asks for the disk(s) to install grub on. On your system this is most likely /dev/sda. Or get the device name from the debconf database: readlink -f $(debconf-show grub-pc 2>/dev/null | grep grub-pc/install_devices: | cut -d ':' -f2) Cheers, Sven