Grub 2 Basics

[bodypilot]

Hi all,

I posted this in the Installation & Upgrade section but then found this thread and though my problem would better fit here:

I accidentally pressed the power button when my laptop was booting which resulted in a forced shut-down.
Now when I power-up I'm presented with Grub2 recovery options (see attachment for an example).
The problem I'm having is that I can not use the keyboard at this point in the boot-process so I can not select the OS nor boot a OS by pressing enter.
For some reason my keyboard only works once the OS has booted. I can not get into BIOS either. Neither with the build-in keyboard (in my laptop) nor with an external keyboard.

It has been this way for a couple of months and has never been a problem before (keyboard works fine when Ubuntu has booted).

I can boot a Ubuntu LiveCD (typing this message on the affected laptop booted using Ubuntu 9.10 LiveCD).

So...how do I get rid of this recovery-console and boot Ubuntu?

Tech info:
Ubuntu 9.10
Asus A6VM laptop
Single hard disk divided into 3 partitions (/dev/sda1, /dev/sda2 attached to /home and /dev/sda3 as a swap partition.

[bodypilot]

Ha!

Never mind, I managed to get it fixed thanks to this post.
Mine seems to survive "sudo update-grub"

After "sudo update-grub" grub.cfg still contains the "recordfail=1" and
if [ ${recordfail} = 1 ]; then
set timeout=-1
else
set timeout=10
fi
entries but somehow Ubuntu now boots just fine.

[Lechatelier]

I was unimpressed by the boot speed in Ubuntu 9.10 with its new grub2 boot loader.But I could configure it with some eye candy and hope for an speed improvement in 10.04 Boot speed is not big deal if you only boot once every other day.

But What impressed mi more is the boot speed for ubuntu 10.04 and it's cute new interface:

Error; no such device: b013b813-3a6a-4f1e-8809-c445cce87676.

I know this cute number identifies a partition which can have other aliases such /dev/hda1 or /dev/sda1 or some times /dev/sdb1 /dev/hb1 o (hd0,0). Very nice! Specially if you have a system with several disks and partitions.

I know that sometime in the future, this system will be better than sliced bread. But today my system does not boot.

I have tried to reinstall 10.4 and install 8.04 but I still have the same result.

Error; no such device: b013b813-3a6a-4f1e-8809-c445cce87676.

I could take my hard disks and install them in my other computer so I can read them while I study to find a solution. But they are sata and the old computer is pata (

Should I buy a new hard disk, install some distro which boots and then start recovering my data.

While looking for a solution I found there are many people with exactly the same problem Is all this mess necessary?

Does any body know a solution. I tried several, including reinstall but they did not work.

[ranch hand]

There is, I am sorry to say, little information of use in your post.

How about booting to a Live CD and running this boot info script and posting the resulting text?

http://bootinfoscript.sourceforge.net/

[mhenriday]

As a follow-up to the discussion we had on pp 38 and 39 of this thread regarding the problems I had in accessing the Windows loader from GRUB2 after upgrading from Karmic to Lucid beta 1 (problems which persisted through beta 2 and into the present stable release), I'd like to report that, thanks to Takkat, who kindly posted to the Launchpad bug I filed (#571893), I have been now able to resolve the problem. In my opinion, however, it must still be deemed a serious bug in the Karmic → Lucid upgrade on multi-boot computers ; users of such boxes shouldn't have to jump through these hoops in order to get a simple upgrade to work properly ! In any event, thanks are due dino99, ranchhand, and in particular, kansasnoob, for their gracious suggestions in this regard....

Henri

[mister_k81]

I was unimpressed by the boot speed in Ubuntu 9.10 with its new grub2 boot loader.But I could configure it with some eye candy and hope for an speed improvement in 10.04 Boot speed is not big deal if you only boot once every other day.

But What impressed mi more is the boot speed for ubuntu 10.04 and it's cute new interface:

Error; no such device: b013b813-3a6a-4f1e-8809-c445cce87676.

I know this cute number identifies a partition which can have other aliases such /dev/hda1 or /dev/sda1 or some times /dev/sdb1 /dev/hb1 o (hd0,0). Very nice! Specially if you have a system with several disks and partitions.

I know that sometime in the future, this system will be better than sliced bread. But today my system does not boot.

I have tried to reinstall 10.4 and install 8.04 but I still have the same result.

Error; no such device: b013b813-3a6a-4f1e-8809-c445cce87676.

I could take my hard disks and install them in my other computer so I can read them while I study to find a solution. But they are sata and the old computer is pata (

Should I buy a new hard disk, install some distro which boots and then start recovering my data.

While looking for a solution I found there are many people with exactly the same problem Is all this mess necessary?

Does any body know a solution. I tried several, including reinstall but they did not work.

I'm having a similar problem with 10.04. I get this error message:

ALERT: /dev/disk/by-uuid/"long-string-of-leters-and-numbers" does not exist. Dropping to shell!

The only way I can get around it, is by typing "exit" into initramfm which will continue boot up. It's really quite annoying. Grub 2 has seriously been nothing but a hassle for me, since it was introduced into Ubuntu. I generally just uninstall it and replace it with legacy Grub, but I can't seem to figure out how to do that in 10.04.

[blegs38552]

Just installed 10.4 All my efforts to make Windows the default and change colors for the boot menu using the recommended techniques failed. For whatever reason, the change to the default did not take.When I edited the colors in the 05_Debian_theme file, there were 2 entries for that file in grub2.cfg. Finally, opened grub2.cfg using sudo gedit, moved the O/S (file 30.os_prober) above the Linux (10_Linux), commented out the color scheme that I did not want, saved the file and rebooted. Menu had the desired color scheme, and Windows is now the default, and appears first on the menu.

I know they say not to edit this file, but it worked (I made a backup first, just in case), and yes, I did run sudo update-grub after changing the files in etc/grub.d.

[blegs38552]

Well, Linux is still a work in progress, no matter what anyone says. This is why I still use Windows 7 for any mission critical work (finances, photo editing, important correspondence...etc.I have been lucky, my install worked. Are you installing on a dual boot computer with Windows? What I would say is that you might try deleting the Linux partitions in Windows. This will leave use the unallocated/free space. Try reinstalling Uuntu using the option for it to install in the free space. Another option would be to install using wubi.exe, which will perform the install inside of Windows.

If you are not installing along side of Windows, you might look for a app that you can boot to from a CD that will enable you to copy any data files to a USB drive. Once you have done that, do a total reformatting of your hard disk, if possible, making one large unformatted partition (there should e some freeware that will enable you to do that), and reinstalling from there.

There do not seem to be any good alternatives - hopefully, your important data resides on another PC, or has at least been backed up to one.

This does highlight the importance of backing data up to an external source, and of being careful in choosing an O/S for critical business data or home finances and pictures...etc.

I was unimpressed by the boot speed in Ubuntu 9.10 with its new grub2 boot loader.But I could configure it with some eye candy and hope for an speed improvement in 10.04 Boot speed is not big deal if you only boot once every other day.

But What impressed mi more is the boot speed for ubuntu 10.04 and it's cute new interface:

Error; no such device: b013b813-3a6a-4f1e-8809-c445cce87676.

I know this cute number identifies a partition which can have other aliases such /dev/hda1 or /dev/sda1 or some times /dev/sdb1 /dev/hb1 o (hd0,0). Very nice! Specially if you have a system with several disks and partitions.

I know that sometime in the future, this system will be better than sliced bread. But today my system does not boot.

I have tried to reinstall 10.4 and install 8.04 but I still have the same result.

Error; no such device: b013b813-3a6a-4f1e-8809-c445cce87676.

I could take my hard disks and install them in my other computer so I can read them while I study to find a solution. But they are sata and the old computer is pata (

Should I buy a new hard disk, install some distro which boots and then start recovering my data.

While looking for a solution I found there are many people with exactly the same problem Is all this mess necessary?

Does any body know a solution. I tried several, including reinstall but they did not work.

[bond711]

Hey,

does anyone know if within the grub2 config files if something like an 'includes' can be used to add the content of another file, this is so that I can outlay all the general settings in one file, and use it across several sub-menus I'm using.

e.g. at the top of each /boot/grub/grub_##.cfg file I have a line like
includes /boot/grub/grub_menu.cfg

cheers

[ranch hand]

I do not know if that will work but I would try adding everything you want to the /etc/default/grub file.

I would also check all the links at the bottom of the first post. There is some real handy info in every one of the threads by drs305.