[sf-lug] Grub 1 loading stage read error

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Christian Einfeldt (einfeldt at gmail.com):

> A teacher called me today saying that when she tries to boot up her Ubuntu
> 10.04, she gets an error that reads
> 
> "Grub 1 loading stage read error"
> 
> Googling, I don't see a lot about handling this problem.

Some days, the Linuxmafia.com Knowledgebase is your friend.  Let's
give it a try.

http://linuxmafia.com/kb/ has a 'Kernel' category, which goes to
http://linuxmafia.com/kb/Kernel .  There are a couple of 'Grub Tutorial' 
links, there.  The second of them is described as 

 GRUB Tutorial - Extensive tutorial for original GRUB 

Let's try that.  Link goes to:
http://dedoimedo.com/computers/grub.html

Skipping down a bit:

  GRUB works in stages.

  Stage 1 is located in the MBR and mainly points to Stage 2, since the
  MBR is too small to contain all of the needed data. 

So, there you go.  Maybe GRUB was installed so that the 'stage 1'
handler code was in the MBR, and subsequently someone did a re-install
of MS-Windows, in which Microsoft arrogates to itself the right to
blithely overwrite the MBR without bothering to check with the user.

Anyhow, the remainder of that page says quite a bit more, including some
suggestions for recovery after something has clobbered the boot chain.