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20015
Haswell/Ubuntu XP13 official recovery media fails with: "error: invalid arch independent ELF magic. grub rescue>"
I installed the 'dell-recovery' package and used it to create a new USB recovery media, without error.
I used the custom partition option, so I could have separate / and /home partitions.
When I was done the computer no longer boots of the hard drive. Instead, I get this error from GRUB:
"error: invalid arch independent ELF magic. grub rescue>"
If this is how well the official recovery tools work, perhaps I should return it and go back to installing Ubuntu myself on used Lenovo ThinkPads.
Is there some trick to getting the Dell Recovery tool to actually work?
Paying for a premium pre-installed Ubuntu laptop is quickly becoming not worthwhile.
markstos
25 Posts
0
December 27th, 2013 18:00
This Ubuntu bug report appears to be related:
reinstall of precise breaks grub with invalid arch independent ELF magic
markstos
25 Posts
0
December 27th, 2013 19:00
I think this issue was related to whether the Recovery installation was booted via UEFI or BIOS at re-install time. I'm still not certain if one or the other would prevent the issue.
I was able to address the issue by downloading grub-pc and all dependencies onto a USB stick, while booting the system from a Linux Live CD, then mouting the root partition on the hard drive, setting up the bind mounts, chroot'ing into the new system, mounting the second USB stick with the extra packages, purging the old grub-efi* packages, and finallly using "dpkg -i" to install to the replacement grub-pc* packages. After that, the machine would boot off the hard drive again.
References:
http://fermilinux.fnal.gov/documentation/tips/mount-bind-chroot
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/grub2/+bug/934614