GRUB seems to have crashed on me again

I really like Mandriva, but GRUB seems to have a vendetta against me. Last December I dual-booted Vista and Ubuntu for three days until GRUB crashed and I couldn't reach either OS. Well, now I can't get into my Mandriva 2009 install because it fails somewhere in the boot process (I believe that's handled by GRUB - it mentions GRUB). I get about halfway through the bootup on the progress bar and then it goes into text mode, and I get these snippets amongst others:

Any ideas what may be causing this? I may have already lost my data (booted from the Mandriva CD and started the install process thinking I'd get a chance to use a Recovery Console like I had to do all the time with Vista, but it started formatting first instead), but it may occur again. Is there a nice "fixboot" or "fixmbr" or similar command for GRUB similar to how there is in Windows?

Or is there a way to use a different bootloader other than GRUB in Mandriva? One catastrophic crash was enough to convince me not to use GRUB on my real hard disk, but now I really don't want to use it on virtual machines, either. I've still got a Mandriva 2008.1 install that's working, and would like to re-install 2009 if the System Recovery CD (the downloadable one) can't fix this one (also why the fixmbr questions are still relevant). But I just really don't trust the GRUB bootloader.

Fortunately I don't believe any data was lost, as I had everything either on my school's Red Hat computers, my Windows install, or on GMail in addition to on Mandriva. But if I want to use Linux as my primary platform for anything that will take more than one session to complete, I'm going to have to be able to trust the bootloader not to crash, as I can't be backing up my data constantly, and know that I won't be if I trust it not to crash.

(just to be fair, I didn't trust Vista not to crash, either, and took to saving my data on a flash drive. but I'm not sure quite how to access flash drives in Mandriva in VirtualBox, and anyways, that's not near as good as having actual stability)

I already had a rather negative backronym for GRUB - now it seems to have reinforced the accuracy of my backronym .

edit: Should note that Safe Mode still worked for Mandriva, but Regular Mode didn't. And since Safe Mode was text-only, it wasn't nigh useful enough for me. Technically I could have done most of what I use Linux for in text mode, but the whole point of having Mandriva on my machine in the first place was so I didn't have to use text mode - I could already do that via SSH.

 

I've never had GRUB fail before. Can you recall anything that may have happened to affect either your mbr or your /boot/grub? There might be a bug specific to Mandriva 2009. Also, please give us some detailed info on your hardware. I'm not certain, but it might help pin down the problem.

The reason I ask these is that GRUB is known to be very stable and reliable, which leads me to think there might be another issue with your system. However, there is a more archaic alternative to GRUB called LILO. I think Fedora (Red Hat) offers LILO as an option during install. I'm not sure about Mandriva.

 

It had been about a week since I'd last used Mandriva - I'd been doing C++ programming in it at the time. Pretty sure the last things I'd installed were an old version of the GNU C++ Compiler, and Opera 9.62. VirtualBox settings haven't been changed for the past several boot-ups. I did occasionally turn it off without shutting it down, and hibernate Windows whilst Mandriva was running - stuff that probably isn't recommended but had never caused me a problem before, even on a real machine or when I terminated Windows when it was partially installed.

For the December incident, I hadn't been doing much with Ubuntu at all - I remember listening to some songs on Vista one night (can't recall what else I did, but nothing intensive), shutting down the computer, and when I restarted the bootloader wouldn't start.

Hardware for Mandriva:
*Virtual Box dynamically expanding hard drive, 5.00 GB (actual size 3.50 GB at time of crash)
*1280 MB RAM, 96 MB VRAM allocated
*Windows DirectSound on host, Intel AC97 emulated video card
*PC-Net Fast III (NAT) ethernet
*One USB device filter (for my flash drive)
*ACPI enabled, IO APIC disabled, Intel VT disabled (got switched off when running multiple VM's at once), PAE disabled

Actual hardware whilst running Ubuntu with GRUB natively (still same hardware, except now 4 GB Kingston DDR2 PC-5300 5 CAS)
*Hitachi TravelStar 7K160 (same series that has 7K200 as top-of-the-line)
*GeForce 8600M GT DDR2
*T7500
*2 GB Qimonda PC-5300, 5 CAS
*TSST Corp DVD +/- R/W
*Broadcom 100 MBps Ethernet
*Dell A/G wireless (hadn't got operable within Ubuntu)
*Dell Bluetooth 2.0 (hadn't tried at all within Ubuntu)

Google seems to say Mandriva 2007.0 was the last to support Lilo, and Fedora hasn't been agreeing with Virtual Box for me too well, though I may try it again once the final version 10 is out.

The other possibility is I did something in Windows that somehow affected the virtual hard drive file. And while I've done plenty that could have/intentionally did corrupt(ed) files in C:\Windows\System32 recently, I can't think of anything that would have affected anything within My Documents (where my virtual hard drive is). And my other virtual hard drives are in perfect condition.

I know GRUB generally has a favourable reputation, but it hasn't held up well for me - three days, quite near exactly a month, and about 40 days and counting are how long it's lasted for me, whereas I've yet to have a Windows bootloader crash (though Vista managed to accomplish the same end result another way). Hence why I'd kind of like to use a different one for Linux.

The data recovery effort seems to be headed towards failure - I think I'll give it up. Though it'll be awhile before I reinstall Mandriva - certainly not tonight - so if there's a "fixmbr" type command, do tell in the unlikely event that it may resurrect my partially-nuked partition.

 

Well, didn't figure out a way to recover the data, but went ahead with the re-install and found out that the Internet lied (either that or something changed since the data I read was written) and Mandriva 2009.0 does indeed support Lilo. So I've got my install up and working again with Lilo as the bootloader, and am cautiously optimistic that I won't have any bootloader problems again.