[ale] Boot failed

[John Wells]

Guys,

I rebooted my Ubuntu box last night for the first time in a long time.  I
believe, since last reboot, I had actually installed a new kernel via
apt-get update but can't swear to it.

Regardless, after posting and before getting and grub prompt I get a
simple, ominous and downright rude message: "Boot failed". Nothing more,
nothing less. It has a certain Edgar Allen Poe quality to it, the way it
states it so matter-of-factly.

I digress. I can boot up with an Ubuntu live cd or Knoppix and mount
/dev/hda just fine...can see that it contains everything I would expect it
to. I tried to mount / and /boot and then chroot to the root mount
directory and issue "grub-install /dev/hda". This returned no errors, but
upon reboot, quoth the computer..."Boot failed".

So, two questions:

First, any idea what could have caused this? I'm guessing here, but it
would seem that the boot record has been corrupted in some way, but then
why would grub-install fail? I'm simply trying to understand the variety
of ways this might have happened. I assume the message is coming not from
grub but from the bios, as I'm well aware of what a grub-driven boot
failure looks like. Could it be that the drive (only 4 months young) is
failing, even though I'm able to mount partitions?

Second, what steps would you take to troubleshoot this? Is my best option
to go ahead and reinstall the OS (I have it partitioned well enough to
reduce the impact of this, assuming no problems with LVM and software
raid).

Thanks guys, as always...

John