I had a strange thing happen to me this weekend. I have an old thinkpad t20/t21 frankenstein that I've been forcing to stay alive by canabalizing parts from other thinpads of the same model over the years. I initially set it up as an ubuntu server install, but later added GNOME so I could remote desktop into it. I run the updates on it regularly, but it doesn't get rebooted very often.
This weekend I was doing some work in the room it's in and accidentally unplugged it. Since the battery on it is shot, it went right down. When I tried rebooting the initial kernel selected in GRUB--called something like linux-kernel-pae--failed to boot the machine, and it did that kernel panic thing where the LEDs start blinking together. I kept rebooting, working my way down the list of kernels until one got me back to my desktop. Ran updates again to see if a new kernel was available and saw that I was up to date, but a number of packages that shared the name of that first kernel on the list had been held back. So I manually used apt-get to ull down that package, hoping it would enable that first kernel on my list to just work and make any future rebooting not need any manual intervention. Instead, when I rebooted, I got that GRUB 1.99 recovery command line that I never have any success with. So I tried googling and playing with that command line anyway, and failed as usual, and then checked my notes. In the past I've booked up with a live CD and used that to fix grub somehow, but I didn't take good notes on how to do that. So I decided to try that Boot Repair live CD rather than blowing my whole weekend relearning how to fix grub. Boot Repair didn't seem to work though, as the display was all garbled and I couldn't get it to display on an external monitor. So I popped in the live CD and the screen refused to come up at all. I tried this several times but I wasn't even getting the BIOS screen, so I figured the machine was probably dead. I had an old thinkpad R51, and swapped the harddrive from my T20/T21 into that to see if I could get lucky. The computer booted up fine, grub came up the way it should, and the first kernel in the list--the generic-pae thing--worked perfectly. I just had to change /etc/network/interfaces from starting eth0 to starting eth1 and everything seems to work fine. So, I thought this was kind of interesting. I didn't really get to do anything to fix GRUB. Moving the hard drive from one machine to the other seemed to fix it though. How could failing hardware cause GRUB to boot into that emergency command line?
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