grub bug at boot time: no symbol table

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greenpossum
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Joined: Wed Oct 25, 2017 7:06 am

grub bug at boot time: no symbol table

#1 Post by greenpossum »

OS: AntiX 17 32-bit, fresh install

Hardware:

1. Asus EEE PC 900, 32-bit, 1GB RAM, 8 GB disk
2. VirtualBox 32-bit, 1GB RAM, 8 GB disk

What happens: On power up, grub flashes a message saying "no symbol table" before showing the graphical boot menu. After selecting AntiX, it again shows "no symbol table", and a couple of lines later Press any key to continue. If a key is pressed or one waits a few seconds, the boot will continue as normal.

This appears to be an upstream bug in grub, a search on the phrase "grub error no symbol table" shows that this happens in many distros. However this Debian bug report seems to be the most informative:

https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugrepo ... bug=841297

Even though it mentions grub-efi it happens with other boot loaders too, as the search results show. Also this bug seems to have been there perhaps a year or two, and the latest report from a couple of months ago has no solution. The best clue I think is that the load video line in grub.cfg triggers it and perhaps one of the video modules doesn't have symbols.

I first happened on this bug when I tried to fix the warning that vga= was deprecated in favour of gfxpayload but the bug also happens with vga= I tried the suggested fixes in posts, grub-install, update-grub, etc. to no avail.

Although it's just an annoyance slowing down boot, it would be nice if someone could hunt down the bug and take the glory. Debugging grub is a bit beyond me unfortunately.

Cheers and thanks for AntiX, it's just the thing for my ancient netbook. :happy:

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rokytnji.1
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Re: grub bug at boot time: no symbol table

#2 Post by rokytnji.1 »

I ran AntiX for years on EEEPC 900's and wrote tutorials on just that hardware. Virtual Box running on EEEPC 900 with a 800 MHZ celeron processor?

That is not my territory. I would never even think of doing that . Even on my current Single core atom n270 9 inch net-book with a touch screen and 2 gig of ram with a 60 gig SSD drive. Which I replaced my EEEPC's with.

Back then. I ran legacy grub. Now. With 16.2 presently on my touch screen net-book. Which uses grub2. Still no problemo with a regular install. So I think they may be a virtual box setup problem of some sort. Which I am not qualified to answer on.

Later on < in the future >. I will be reinstalling AntiX < 17 Stretch version > on my touch screen net-book. Just procrastinating because of my touch screen hardware. Because I use a little elbow grease to set that up.

Good luck with it. Sorry I am not qualified to trouble shoot this.

Edit. Read your bug report after I posted. Maybe a Debian Stretch bug you found about. I guess I'll find out when I reinstall AntiX on my net-book.

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greenpossum
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Joined: Wed Oct 25, 2017 7:06 am

Re: grub bug at boot time: no symbol table

#3 Post by greenpossum »

Yes, you read it correctly eventually. It happens on both platforms, real and virtual. And it happens in other distros too so I think it's a grub bug, possibly due to some change in the toolchain used to build grub. Good luck with your install.

For the benefit of others as well, I found that unetbootin doesn't create a suitable USB stick but the live USB builder in AntiX 17 does. So I built the USB stick for my netbook using the virtual AntiX 17 writing to the USB stick using USB passthrough (great feature).

rickc
Posts: 24
Joined: Tue Jan 23, 2018 5:01 pm

Re: grub bug at boot time: no symbol table

#4 Post by rickc »

Hi there. Old thread, but the problem remains. I've done a fresh install of MX onto my 10 yr old Dell Latitude and have the same issue.

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entropyfoe
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Re: grub bug at boot time: no symbol table

#5 Post by entropyfoe »

Is this related to 32 bit?
I don't see the error on my 64 bit installation.
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rickc
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Re: grub bug at boot time: no symbol table

#6 Post by rickc »

Yeah mine is a 64bit fresh install

Not really a problem but it's there

rickc
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Joined: Tue Jan 23, 2018 5:01 pm

Re: grub bug at boot time: no symbol table

#7 Post by rickc »

It's a bit strange. Having googled it, this is something that was reported across numerous distro during 2016. Dunno why I have it now!

rickc
Posts: 24
Joined: Tue Jan 23, 2018 5:01 pm

Re: grub bug at boot time: no symbol table

#8 Post by rickc »

I no longer have this issue - I think synaptic sorted it out when I updated

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Paul..
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Re: grub bug at boot time: no symbol table

#9 Post by Paul.. »

please add [Solved] to the title of your original post. thanks.

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