grub error 18

[Christopher Chan]

David Kuntadi wrote:
> On Tue, Sep 22, 2009 at 9:07 AM, Christopher Chan
> <christopher.chan at bradbury.edu.hk> wrote:
>   
>> Man...I well know that the upgrade was done when Adept did its thing and
>> not afterwards during the shutdown. What I am saying is that BEFORE the
>> upgrade, I had no problems with grub. After the upgrade I have continual
>> problems with grub. Something in the updates has introduced a bug is
>> what I am getting at. I cannot think of another reason since
>> reinstalling grub from the LiveCD gets me into the installed Jaunty so
>> grub/bios/cylinder 1024+ cannot be the issue. Otherwise, I should have
>> got a problem after installation and be forced to put /boot in its own
>> partition.
>>     
>
> Well, then we are closer to the root cause. In this case to be
> perfect, get the /boot/grub/menu.lst:
> 1. right after fresh install.
> 2. After package/kernel upgrade (which is when you get error 18).
> 3. After re-install grub using live cd.
>
>   
Pray tell, what changes does running setup(hd0) in grub do to menu.lst? 
That is all I do from the LiveCD to reinstall grub and get back into the 
system. IIRC, that only writes stage1 to the mbr with a pointer to the 
appropriate stage1.5 file.

You missed a few more things too. Don't you think I should also go for

4. After reboot, see grub error 18, fix in LiveCD, get menu.lst
5. repeat 4 until you die of old age trying find differences in the 
menu.lst file.

> But the best if you could identify which package are causing the
> errror, I suspect kernel upgrade. In that case, get the kernel (
> uname -r):
>
> 1. right after the fresh install
> 2. after re-install grub using live cd.
>
> Then you are loaded for a bug report.
>   


I highly doubt that a kernel package is the problem. After all, it does 
its thing only during the upgrade process of apt/synaptic/adept and 
should not have any more effect on subsequent reboots right? And if it 
was a problem, the simple setup command in grub would not have got 
around it. Faulty entries in menu.lst cannot be part of the problem here.