I don’t normally reboot my Linux machine. But this morning I was forced to because I installed a hard drive that the Wife’s desktop machine was no longer recognizing properly. It’s a 1.5TB Caviar drive from Western Digital. I installed it many moons ago (at this point) to store some of her home video work. At the time, it worked fine. It was only ever a backup drive so usage was minimal and somewhere along the way, Windows refused to recognize it as anything more than a 500GB drive that was inaccessible because Windows wanted to reformat it. This may or may not be related to the computer’s BIOS, which also only recognizes it as a 500GB drive.
Rather than be so hasty, I figured I’d try it out on my machine to see if the drive itself was bad, or if Windows was bad (my money was secretly on Windows.) So I shutdown my computer, installed the drive, plugged in all the cables and rebooted.
And was summarily dumped into grub rescue mode with a wonderfully cryptic message “Symbol not found: grub_divmod64_full.”
My initial reaction was … unprintable. All I can say is there was no physical violence, though it was touch and go for a couple seconds. Alas, the same cannot be said for my mouth.
On the chance that the newly installed hard drive was at fault, I powered down and disconnected the power and the data cables. Unfortunately, I ended up in the same place after re-powering.
After calming down, I futzed with things for a bit and quickly concluded that the problem was that grub was not attempting to boot the correct drive. I was somewhat flummoxed as to how that happened, but it seemed clear enough. The whole circumstance felt eerily familiar.
I had actually resolved myself to fixing the problem via a USB stick install medium. Towards that end, I rebooted into the BIOS setup to check the boot priorities. The computer was already configured properly in terms of device, so then, on a lark, I checked the hard drive boot priorities.
There is where I found my problem. The hard drive boot priorities had been shuffled and the drive with grub on it was no longer the 1st device. After ordering the drives properly, I rebooted and was happy to see a proper bootloader screen followed by everything loading up without issue. I can only conclude that installing the new drive caused the BIOS to shuffle the drive priorities around thus, breaking my system.
On the plus side, the hard drive works great. I don’t think I’ll be un-installing it any time soon though.
2 replies on “Check Your Drive Boot Priorities”
Thanks for posting — you saved my life… well, at least my sanity. I just upgraded Ubuntu on my desktop after it worked more or less without problems on my laptop; when I tried to reboot I was confronted with exactly the same cryptic message, and I’m pretty sure my reaction was as unprintable as yours. I spent at least an hour searching Ubuntu forums, bug reports, etc, with no success, till I found this and solved the problem. An unexpected cause, I have to admit. I don’t think I would have figured that out on my own. Thank fate for Google and people who share the solutions to their computer problems 🙂
I’ve solved many a computer problem using Google and the like, I figure I’m obligated to pay it back somehow.
Glad it helped.