14.04

[Nils Kassube]

Colin Law wrote:
> On 19 April 2014 22:01, R Kimber <richardkimber at btinternet.com> wrote:
> > When I boot up 14.04 I get an otherwise blank screen with the
> > message:
> > 
> > "error: malformed file, press any key to continue".
> 
> Is that standard Ubuntu?

After I posted my previous mail I searched a bit further. While others 
had the same problem, I couldn't see a solution. However I found the 
origin of the error message in the source code of grub2 which comes with 
all Ubuntu flavours, so it probably doesn't matter which Ubuntu flavour 
it is (I'm running Kubuntu myself).

Here is the source code snippet (from grub-core/commands/loadenv.c):

| /* This might be actually valid, but it is unbelievable that
|    any filesystem makes such a silly allocation.  */
| return grub_error (GRUB_ERR_BAD_FS, "malformed file");

So some integrity check can't believe what it reads, prints a cryptic 
error message and then lets the user press a key. As there is no hint 
WHICH file may be malformed, this isn't helpful in any way IMHO.

Like I wrote before, the error is gone on my system after reinstalling 
grub to the MBR. I'm curious if that works for Richard as well.


Nils