GRUB2 hangs on "Welcome to GRUB!"

GRUB2 hangs on "Welcome to GRUB!"

Roberto Bifulco — Sat, 09/11/2010 - 21:42   ( http://robertobifulco.it/node/336 )

    edited by Elias Chatzigeorgiou :)  — Wed, 04/01/2012 - 19:30 ( http://elias-chatzigeorgiou.blogspot.com/2012/01/grub2-hangs-on-welcome-to-grub.html )

Today i played with debian "squeeze", that is currently under test and is the next Debian release. I encountered some problems while installing GRUB2 using the Debian Installer from a USB pen, infact i had to switch to a kubuntu live edition in order to install grub2 manually to enable the boot procedure without the live media (that in my case was again a USB pen).

Unfortunately on system reboot i found GRUB2 hang on the "Welcome to GRUB!" message. After some research on Google i came with this BUG: http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=594967

The problem is in the GRUB graphical console, so it was sufficient to:

1. boot the system again through the live distribution
2. mount the linux partition (e.g. /dev/sda5)

   mkdir /mnt/sda5
   mount /dev/sda5 /mnt/sda5
   

3. mount --bind /dev, /sys and /proc so that you will retain them after the chroot

   mount --bind /dev /mnt/sda5/dev
   mount --bind /sys /mnt/sda5/sys
   mount --bind /proc /mnt/sda5/proc 

4. do the chroot

   chroot /mnt/sda5
   

5. modify the configuration of GRUB2 (/etc/deafult/grub)  to uncomment GRUB_TERMINAL=console
6. update the GRUB configuration (update-grub)
7. reboot the system

Booting GRUB from text console solved the problem, and now the system is correctly working.

Here you can found a guide to configure/install GRUB from a live distribution, in case you need it: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Grub2 (Recover GRUB2 via Live CD paragraph)