GRUB GRUB GRUB GRUB...

Trying to fix obscure boot problems through an SSH login 6 000 kilometers away from the actual machine is not my idea of fun. Especially not while sleep-deprived and hungry, late Sunday night with a need to get the machine up by Monday morning.

For future reference: when GRUB fails to load the operating system and instead fills the screen with an endless sequence of GRUB GRUB GRUB, the problem is very likely due to the BIOS being set to detect hard drives automatically. Changing the BIOS setting from "Auto" to "User" was what finally solved the problem. I had to talk a human into doing this for me, of course.

Somehow (I'd love to hear a detailed explanation if anyone know) this auto detection makes GRUB load its own loading code instead of the next loader stage, causing an infinite loop. I'm told something similar happens with LILO as well; perhaps it's a common BIOS problem causing wrong or exotic disk geometry values to be reported.

27 June, 2005

Tasteless on so many levelsDeep Impact a smashing success