grub boot error : "symbol 'grub calloc' not found - Ubuntu Server 18.04 LTS

Question

Having read a lot of the posts and responses I'm sorry to have to start a new thread on this topic - for reasons below. I am currently running a physical server (HP ProLiant Gen 8) with 8GB RAM installed with Ubuntu Server 18.04 LTS on it. The server contains 4 physical HDDs (no RAID) with one physical drive (sda1) allocated where the OS resides.

I have tried a couple of the suggested workarounds without success. In particular I have tried the 64bit Boot Repair Disk from Sourceforge which I loaded onto an 8GB USB stick using Unetbootin and restarted my server. Having selected the option to repair in 64bit "safe mode" (the default and other options failed to work) I could see that the server was running the repair disk however it then stopped with the final line of text being

(initramfs) mount: mounting /dev/loop0 on //filesystem.squashfs failed: Invalid argument Can not mount /dev/loop0 (cdrom/casper/filesystem.squashfs) on //filesystem.squashfs

Prior to that last line of text there was also an error message which reads

squashfs: SQUASHFS error: unable to read xattr id index table

After these lines appeared the system just hangs.

I'm at my wits end and would be grateful for a solution please.

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

I had the exact same problem but on a VM.

I fixed it using boot-repair-cd.

It's pretty straight forward, you need to create a live CD/DVD/USB with the downloaded ISO file. I followed the recommended fix suggested by the software and it worked, the entire process only took 5 minutes.