[mythtv-users] OT: Wierd boot issue

[Rick Lane]

On Mar 29, 2012 7:51 PM, "Neil Cooper" <neilcoo at yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
>
> This is somewhat off-topic for a MythTV forum but I can't find an answer
anywhere else. Mostly because grub doesn't seem to have a good support
website anywhere.
>
> My MythTV box is a combined 0.24 backend/frontend running over Ubuntu
10.04. It has a single WD 2TB hard drive. It uses  ACPI bios wakeup to wake
itself up in time for recordings.
>
> Every now and again when it wakes itself up, instead of booting properly
it fails somewhere at the grub stage. The screen is completely black other
than a message "File not found".
>
> After power cycling (all you can do from that point), the grub boot menu
appears and doesn't time out even though its set to.
>
> This is bloody inconvenient because my myth box is normally keyboardless
so I have to go get a keyboard just to hit "enter" on the grub menu to have
it boot.
>
> Subsequent (re)boots work fine again without Grub bringing up its menu
until sometime later I get the dreaded "file not found" issue abnd go round
the loop again.
>
> The main fix would be to get to the bottom of why every now and again
grub cannot find vmlinuz (which is basically what I'm guessing is causing
the 'File Not Found" issue). The drive is alive enough for grub to load so
its not a drive powerup timeout issue.
>
> If the main problem is not answerable, the workaround would be to get the
grub menu to always time out. It seems grub has detected that the previous
boot failed so is 'intelligently' (and annoyingly) bringing up the boot
menu for the user on the next boot instead of following its
default/configured behaviour. Is this intelligence disableable somehow?
>
> Thanks guys,
> Neil Cooper.
>
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I fell into grubs new trap too.

To disable:

open the grub header file:
sudo nano /etc/grub.d/00_header

Line 242 looks like this:
set timeout=-1

Change to:
set timeout=10

and then save the file and run

sudo update-grub

This will mean if your boot fails, it won't disable default selection
completely, it'll just pause for ten seconds and then boot as normal.

Can't really help with your other issue though. Could it be a flaky sata
cable? I thought my disk was dying on me for a while when I was getting
randomly disappearing disks at boot and it turned out to be the cable. At
least its a cheap enough test...

Rick
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