What does alloc magic broken mean?

I am running linux mint9 32bit on a desktop that I built with some luck. Anyway, in
the last couple of weeks it has been restarting itself randomly and at times I have to restart it several times. It also will just shut off for no apparent reason.

Which brings me to my question. It now appears that it will not boot again and I
get the message "alloc magic is broken at 0x7fe03a00 aborted. Press any key to exit" when a key is pressed it states it cannot find grub and to tell it where to boot
or insert bootable medium.

So what does "alloc magic is broken" mean? I can't find it anywhere.

I fear my hard drive is dead or there is a problem with the motherboard.

Sorry I can't give more detail but it quit again.

Thanks in advance for any help.
Mike

"alloc magic is broken" is an error that occurs in the GRUB memory management.

The GRUB memory manager uses magic numbers in each of it's memory block structures to denote whether that chunk is available or free. When a function in the GRUB loader attempts to free memory, it checks to see if that block is allocated by checking for the magic allocated number. If it doesn't match, you see this error.

When during the boot does it fail? Are you able to see the GRUB menu which lists the operating systems to boot? Are you able to access the GRUB rescue shell to perform diagnostics and try to manually boot your kernel? Are you able to boot a live CD and mount the drive there to ensure that it's not a hard drive issue? Have you updated GRUB recently before seeing this error?