Folk are onto this: the Buster point release is happening right now. People are aware: the issue is also being raised in debian-cd. There are workarounds - it will be sorted.
On Sat, Aug 1, 2020 at 5:20 PM Graham Seaman <gra...@theseamans.net> wrote: > > > On 01/08/2020 14:00, Sven Joachim wrote: > > 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. :-) > > The outdoor temperature was 38 centigrade; in my loft it was > considerably more. The machine is spotless :-) > > > > >> 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. > > > > It has happened to quite a range of users in the last week (search for > 'grub calloc') - users running ubuntu, lubuntu, debian-mint, vanilla > debian, that I've seen. So I assume its some upstream problem with grub. > Some people seem to think the problem only shows on multi-boot-disk or > raid systems, but that didn't apply in my case. > > > >> 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. > > > > I already reinstalled grub-pc (using a rescue-usb) , that's how I got > the system booting again. But I don't know if the current grub is > trustable or not. > > Graham > > > > 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 > > > >
