Problems booting from large partition

[Martijn van Duren]

Hello help-grub@,

I am not suscribed to the list, so please include me in the response.

I have some issues with a grub install on one of my Debian servers. The
symptoms make me assume there is an issue with the size of the partition
on which /boot resides (single large root partition).

Could this assumption be correct and is there a way to fix this without
a full reinstall? I couldn't find anything about this in the
documentation.

The current layout is as follow:
gdisk /dev/sda
GPT fdisk (gdisk) version 0.8.10

Partition table scan:
MBR: protective
BSD: not present
APM: not present
GPT: present

Found valid GPT with protective MBR; using GPT.

Command (? for help): p
Disk /dev/sda: 11718705152 sectors, 5.5 TiB
Logical sector size: 512 bytes
Disk identifier (GUID): A6BF6D09-C065-482A-89DC-DCDC31E0A40B
Partition table holds up to 128 entries
First usable sector is 34, last usable sector is 11718705118
Partitions will be aligned on 2048-sector boundaries
Total free space is 4029 sectors (2.0 MiB)

Number Start (sector) End (sector) Size Code Name
1 2048 4095 1024.0 KiB EF02
2 4096 11523440639 5.4 TiB 8300
3 11523440640 11718703103 93.1 GiB 8200

Where sda2 is ext4.

Grub is grub-efi-amd64 2.02~beta2-22, without any manual modifications
to /etc/default/grub or any of the other files.

When booting I get the following error:
error: invalid arch-independant ELF magic.
Entering rescue mode...
grub rescue> ls /boot/grub/x86_64-efi/
<snip>
syslinuxcfg.mod video_cirrus.mod linux.mod multiboot2.mod videotest.mod
moddep.lst parmap.lst video.lst crypto.lst terminal.lst modinfo.sh
core.efi

When after multiple attempts of rebuilding the confs I get a normal
prompt a cat of /boot/grub/grub.cnf results in a large string of
'<0><0><0>' etc. The fact that a reconfigure/reinstall of grub can get
it to work combined with the fact that a cat of the file results in a
mangled output gives me the impression that there's an issue with the
physical location on disk.

If more information is needed, please let me know.

Sincerely,

Martijn van Duren