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I installed some patches on a Ubuntu 10.04 Server (LTS) system today. After rebooting the newly patched server the boot process is now hosed with an unknown command 'recordfail' message.

If I hit a key, the machine just reboots and gets stuck at the same place. I've tried removing the recordfail line in grub, (E key to edit grub entries) but then I get an unaligned pointer error.

Anyone know what this is from or how to fix it? I've booted a Live system and mounted the hobbled system onto /mnt/slash to try and reinstall the grub packages (aptitude reinstall grub-common grub-pc) from a chroot, but no luck. Also tried grub-install /dev/sda which says it completed without error, but still no boot. Some googling turns up a handful of hits in various languages with only one solution which was a full reinstall of the entire system (yikes!). There's gotta be a better way.

UPDATE: After reconfiguring grub-pc http://i.imgur.com/aCWsKRQ.png

UPDATE 2: ended up creating a tarball of /boot/grub from a working system and un-tarring onto the busted system. I then booted to a live system, created a chroot of the broken system, and ran grub-setup/update-grub from the chroot. I still get the recordfail error message, but the system at least boots now.

Michael Hampton
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Koko
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3 Answers3

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  • edited /etc/defaut/grub and removed GRUB_HIDDEN_TIMEOUT
  • booted from live media, and ran grub-setup /dev/vda -v along with update-grub from chroot
Koko
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After removing the recordfail (which is probably not supported on the newer Grub), you are probably booting into the new kernel which is causing issues with your hardware. I remember I ran into an issue like that with Ubuntu 10.04 LTS. I ended up booting up using SuperGrubDisk.

Once you boot up with SuperGrubDisk or with your liveCD, you can probably modify your grub configs so that it boots into your old kernel.

Note that you must be running Ubuntu 10.04.4 LTS as any other 10.04 version is not supported anymore.

Rico
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  • Could be but I think grub is highly suspect. I say that because update-grub is generating /boot/grub.cfg with 'recordfail' in it. Even after doing grub-setup or grub-install. – Koko Apr 29 '14 at 19:10
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Try this:

  1. Boot using Ubuntu Live CD and select Rescue Mode
  2. In Rescue mode choose to mount your real root partition to /
  3. Mount boot partition (ie. #mount /dev/sda1 /boot)
  4. Run #dpkg-reconfigure grub-pc and to be sure #update-grub
  5. Reboot
Dawid Moś
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  • No luck. Some error about writing to a scsi device (screenshot added in question) Also something about LVM but it's weird because these are all hard partitions on disk. I should mention this is a virtual machine running under Linux KVM, so maybe that has something to do with it. – Koko Apr 29 '14 at 13:47