"error: out of disk" grub rescue on first cold boot

[Jonathan M. Polom]

Thanks for getting back with me Goh. Indeed this is frustrating beyond
belief. I have a 1TB disk with 2 primary partitions and three logical
partitions. I'll try loading the partition modules and respond with
what happens. I'd never have thought that grub2 needed a driver to
access disk partitions. I figure'd that'd just "be part of the
package."

On Mon, May 2, 2011 at 2:47 PM, Goh Lip <g.lip at gmx.com> wrote:
> On 05/03/2011 02:09 AM, Jonathan M. Polom wrote:
>>
>> I'm running Ubuntu 11.04 on
>> a Intel-based system (C2DUO, 4gb ddr2, g33 chipset) with a 1 TB
>> WD1001FALS SATA drive on channel 0. The BIOS hasn't been updated
>> recently but I don't believe my motherboard manufacturer has updated
>> it for a couple years. Anyway onto the problem:
>>
>> Upon first cold boot, grub does not load the menu or operating system.
>> Grub2 displays an "error: out of disk" and then goes to a grub rescue
>> prompt. No length of idle time permits it to load the menu (IE: just
>> leaving it alone does nothing to help the problem). The really weird
>> thing is that if I run 'ls' at the rescue prompt and then execute CTRL
>> ALT DEL to do a warm reboot, grub WILL load Ubuntu next time around. I
>> do not have any other OS on the machine so grub is configured to just
>> boot Ubuntu directly (no menu).
>>
>> I can replicate this problem very reliably. I can also replicate it
>> using both SATA AHCI and "normal" mode for my SATA controller (intel
>> northbridge). When in AHCI mode, however, the error is slightly different:
>> "error: no such device" is displayed instead, along with a rescue prompt.
>> I can likewise get the system booted by executing 'ls' at the rescue
>> prompt but this is the same annoying behavior previously described.
>>
>> I appreciate any help on this issue and am more than happy to provide
>> config files, logs, etc. to help figure out why this problem occurs.
>> While this problem doesn't prevent use of my PC, it does require a
>> very inconvenient workaround. Hopefully I can pick up some insight on this
>> problem on this list as it's very annoying.
>>
>> Note: I have submitted this to the grub help list as well. No response so
>> far.
>>
>
>
> Assume you do not have any partitions (just 1 whole disk without
> partitioning)?
>
> Then see point4-2 of http://ydal.de/using-grub2-to-recover-your-system/
>
>
> If you have devices, but no par­ti­ti­ons, you’ll need a par­ti­tion
> dri­ver. It seems the default grub con­fig does not load any par­ti­tion
> dri­ver, and debug­ging this is just a bit annoy­ing. But there’s two easy
> choices for most people:
>
>    Load the module “part_msdos”.
>    If this doesn’t help, try “part_gpt”.
>
>
> Hope this helps - Goh Lip
>
>
>
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-- 
Jon Polom