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On 15/08/2020 19:13, comrade meowski wrote:
If there was such an error message I missed it, though I always sit at the console while the update is running. I never carry on with something else meanwhile. In future I will watch the messages much more carefully.Credit where it's due chief, you're getting good at fixing stuff now. Mind you, you do seem to get a lot of practice somehow :]There are no negative point awarded for this but _if_ you'd looked really closely at the apt dist-upgrade output the last time you updated the PC there would have been an error printed to console. Not a big one (especially considering how critical the error was) but it would have said amongst the sea of usual text something like "grub-pc: failed" with a warning that the bootloader was NOT reinstalled successfully. That would have been your only clue and most people would have most likely missed it, including me. Quite probably the warning would have even scrolled off the top of your console window and so wouldn't have been visible if you had for example run the update and then flipped away to something else entirely like a web browser while it finished.
This was originally a major Grub security mistake upstream initially (aka "boothole" or CVE-2020-10713) that required an unusually major client-side fix (reinstalling and resetting the bootloader). Loads of distros did not handle the implementation of that fix in their package managers at all well and apparently MX Linux was one of them. Your laptop dodged it because it's UEFI and the grub2 package behaves very differently there compared to BIOS.It was my desktop computer which dodged it, not the laptop. Both machines seem fine now, thanks. And it seems I am not alone, from your comments.Super nasty bug anyway, surprised nobody else has run into it yet.
Still learning, though. It had never occurred to me that the old live USB would no longer work. Replacing it with the latest iso for MX worked. I will remember that.
I was lucky because of all the help I got. Also because I have two computers, one of which is new and using UEFI, so it did not have the same problem. I wonder about people who own just the one, old, machine or even two old ones. They must get really stuck.
Others must have had a similar problem, surely. I feel very lucky, Thanks again, Neil -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG https://mailman.dcglug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/listfaq