Grub Error...
 

I turned my laptop on this afternoon to receive the following screen...:

I can get nowhere from this screen...

A quick google search returns 0 results for the grub error :confused:, so I turn to the experts at linux questions!

The laptop is running xubuntu 9.10, and is been recently updated. I don't know what version of grub it's running, but should be up to date.
If there's any other information you would like (and I would know off the top of my head!) then please ask...

Thanks very much for any help.

...James

Something is corrupt there. I looked at the source code and the symbol should be "grub_strlen". You may have a memory error; or worse, an hard drive error.

I've had reservations about the hard drive of the machine for some time.
This isn't the first time it's had problems.

When it was running Windows it would often BSOD for unknown reasons, until eventually I switched it to linux.
Also occasionally it refuses to boot until the battery has been removed and replaced.

Can someone please confirm that it is a hardware problem and not grub?

Have you run memtest yet?

Also, you might want to try to find a known good copy of the GRUB2 binaries (maybe from the install CD) and use diff to see if there are any errors in the versions on your hard drive.

Hmm, thanks David, I'll run memtest in the morning, and I'll have to make an ubuntu live cd (again!) to do the rest.

I'll let you know how it goes tomorrow.

Thanks again!

Well memtest was fine. I've also ran several hard disk checking utilities, and they've all checked out fine.

I'm currently running HDAT2 and that's reporting numerous problems with the first sectors on the disk with the error : "Memory buffers are different".
After googling it seems that this could be a bug in the program, but lets hope it's not and it actually leads somewhere.

Also worth noting is that the laptop does occasionally boot up with no errors. It seems to be consistent with rebooting after the hard drive has been working furiously (running some disk check, even though no errors are found). But it only works until the next reboot, and if left idle for a while the disk stops working (no programs will open and things start to freeze up).

The original error also changes to different corrupt chars sometimes.


If anyone can offer any more advice it would be very welcome :)

The symptoms you are reporting are consistent with a failing hard drive. They will only get worse and the hard drive will eventually stop working completely.

If you have not backed up your data, please do so as soon as possible. Then buy a new hard drive. There is no way to fix an hard drive that is having these problems.