i ran into a problem yesterday with GRUB that i hope there is an explanation for.

i was working at my laptop in Ubuntu (its also has MS and openSUSE installed on it) and then went to eat, so it sat idle for a while and then went into suspend or hibernation or whatever. before leaving the computer, i had been trying to chmod a directory without success. when i returned, i hit the power button to start up, as usual.

the GRUB options screen came up, but none of my partitions would load. i was getting an "Error 15 file not found" for the SUSE partitions and an "Error 17 can't mount the selected partition" for the Ubuntu and MS partitions. i don't know what 15 means, because i don't know what file it refers to. and i didn't know why any partitions couldn't be mounted because i hadn't messed with any partitioning recently.

after fumbling around with GRUB Super Disk (what a savior!), i was able to get everything pretty much working again. somehow, my /boot/grub/menu.lst file on Ubuntu was edited. a couple of lines of the MS partition information were removed, which was why it wouldn't work, i guess. the Ubuntu partition info saw a line changed to (hd0,0) when it was supposed to be (hd0,6) and the old kernel i had for Ubuntu, which had been edited out of the GRUB startup menu, had been uncommented, so it showed up in the GRUB startup menu again.

sorry for the long post, but here is my question: how did all the things in the previous paragraph happen? i wasn't anywhere near /boot, let alone GRUB, when i was most recently logged into Ubuntu. is there some kind of explanation for how GRUB got edited without me doing anything to it?

Files don't edit themselves, so if you're sure you didn't do anything about it, you might want to check out if there have been unwanted visitors at your pc, either locally when you were away or trough network.

We may never unravel this, but keep in mind that--with multiple Linux installs--you can wind up with more than one version of menu.lst