Benx Shen's Library tagged ubuntu9.10 →  View Popular

"cat /boot/grub/grub.cfg" gives a screen full of garbage. Even "cat /etc/passwd" gives garbage. "ls" can find the files just fine. I can still boot manually by giving the proper "linux" and "initrd" arguments. These files are NOT ACTUALLY CORRUPTED, they can be read just fine in ubuntu. Only grub can no longer read them. That's problem #1.

Summary: Moving, renaming, or regenerating ANY file, whether it's the kernel, initrd or grub.cfg results in those files becoming unreadable by grub2, probably because they're not being found in the correct place on the drive, resulting in garbage for text files, and invalid magic numbers for binaries. Also, grub-install's modification of C:\wubildr has no effect, and it also leaves behind a mess in /boot/grub on the linux side.