Bug#550702: grub-pc: Grub hangs after having ran Windows XP

[Emmanuel Gamby]

Felix Zielcke wrote:
> Am Montag, den 12.10.2009, 12:55 +0200 schrieb Emmanuel Gamby:
>   
>> Package: grub-pc
>> Version: 1.97~beta3-1
>> Severity: important
>>
>> I have a laptop (HP/Compaq nc8430) with a dual (Linux/Windows XP
>> Professional) boot. When I switch to Windows and try to reboot Linux
>> afterwards, Grub hangs during the welcome message. I need to rerun
>> grub-install from a live CD to be able to boot again into my system.
>>
>> Dual boot worked like a charm with the previous version of Grub.
>> Dual boot was automatically configured using os-prober.
>>     
>
> So this happens only after booting Windows but not when you reboot from
> Linux to Linux?
>   
Yes, that's exactly the case. Booting from Linux to Linux causes no problem.
> In that case something in your Windows is overwriting the embeding area
> between MBR and first partition.
> But strange that you didn't had this problem with GRUB Legacy.
> It uses the same area too, except that it's stage1.5 is much smaller
> then GRUB 2's core.img
>   
Yes, I agree with you. Is it a way to easily validate this. For 
instance, by dumping the corresponding sectors before and after the 
problem ?
> Hm maybe try if booting into the Windows safe mode also causes this.
>
> The only way we could fix this inside GRUB 2 would be to add an option
> to grub-install to force the use of blocklists.
> But we won't do that.
> In fact we did it the other way, you need to use the --force option if
> you really want them in case embeding isn't possible.
>
> A workaround for you would be use the MBR code of the `mbr' package and
> then install GRUB 2 to a bootsector instead of MBR and set the
> boot/active flag on that partition.
>   
Well, I am not a GRUB expert, but I will read the manual.

Thanks for your help.