[mythtv-users] OT: Wierd boot issue

[Neil Cooper]

This is somewhat off-topic for a MythTV forum but I can't find an answer anywhere else. Mostly because grub doesn't seem to have a good support website anywhere.

My MythTV box is a combined 0.24 backend/frontend running over Ubuntu 10.04. It has a single WD 2TB hard drive. It uses  ACPI bios wakeup to wake itself up in time for recordings.

Every now and again when it wakes itself up, instead of booting properly it fails somewhere at the grub stage. The screen is completely black other than a message "File not found".

After power cycling (all you can do from that point), the grub boot menu appears and doesn't time out even though its set to.

This is bloody inconvenient because my myth box is normally keyboardless so I have to go get a keyboard just to hit "enter" on the grub menu to have it boot. 

Subsequent (re)boots work fine again without Grub bringing up its menu until sometime later I get the dreaded "file not found" issue abnd go round the loop again.

The main fix would be to get to the bottom of why every now and again grub cannot find vmlinuz (which is basically what I'm guessing is causing the 'File Not Found" issue). The drive is alive enough for grub to load so its not a drive powerup timeout issue.

If the main problem is not answerable, the workaround would be to get the grub menu to always time out. It seems grub has detected that the previous boot failed so is 'intelligently' (and annoyingly) bringing up the boot menu for the user on the next boot instead of following its default/configured behaviour. Is this intelligence disableable somehow?

Thanks guys,
Neil Cooper.