[LBo] Mishap with grub-reboot

[Anita Lewis]

I tried something and got my fingers burned.  I don't know why, but here
is what happened.

I found the command 'grub-reboot' and read the manpage and decided to
try it.  The idea was to run it with the stanza in grub that I wanted to
reboot into.  I put '2' in because I had Windows as my second stanza. I
forgot that it should be '1' but when the menu came up and I saw that I
wasn't getting Windows, I selected it and that was that.

Then I rebooted thinking I would go into Ubuntu.  Not so.  I got:

Error 18: Selected cylinder exceeds maximum supported by BIOS

I also got it with a few other choices, but with the single user mode, I
got booted.  Over and over I tried.  I examined menu.lst to see how that
looked.  I deleted quiet and splash and anything strange looking. Still,
no way in except single user and then exit into multi-user.

Finally I tried running 'grub-set-default 0' and I was able to boot
normally.

Prior to using the grub-reboot command, I looked at /boot/grub/default
and it was a normal text file which said not to edit directly.  When I
was having the problem, I found it was a binary file.  After the fix, it
still says it is binary, but I can open it in vi and there is only a
small weird character in it, but it has 0 as the first character.  I see
the notice not to edit it.

So that is my story.  It looks like grub-reboot is not all that safe to
run, although perhaps it would not have caused the problem if I had used
'1' instead of '2'. Stanza 3 (grub 2) is a working boot option; so I
don't know why that would be an issue.  Perhaps it had to do with my
interrupting and booting into something else.  I have no idea.  Just
thought I'd let you know in case you see the command and want to try it.
 Be prepared to use that single-user safe mode and to run
grub-set-default if you get the same issue I did.

Anita