On start up, I get 'grub loading read error'. It takes several reboots until I can boot the box. I am not sure if it is the drive going or grub needs to be fixed. Are there any utilities that can verify the problem?

Hey Sirius,

It probably is
You can reinstall grub and that may fix it for a time but the one likeable thing about code is it always works the same way (at least until the next major revision in the language). The drive is probably reaching it's end of life (which for some drives is shorter than others) and becoming non-compliant. You can google the drive name and "grub" in case there is some hardware bug but I've always worked off the assumption that intermittent functionality indicates a hardware problem if the machine state remains constant between instantiations.

I used my linux source disk and used the update utility, not the install and that reinstalled the boot loader. All is fine for now. It is grub2.

Hello I am facing same issue how to solve this error

Hello, this is your first post, so welcome.

You have replied to an old post having the same problem. You should however start your own thread describing your problem, giving some more information instead of just saying "i am having the same problem".