GRUB RESCUE prompt

[Tufty]

Well, you should first back up your data and then make your machine bootable again.

To do the first thing you need any OS that can be run from a removable media. If you have Ubuntu live CD, that's very easy. Just boot your computer with the live CD and when the menu shows up choose
"Try Ubuntu without any changes ...". Do NOT choose "install Ubuntu...". When Ubuntu desktop shows up, attach a flash memory stick big enough for you data to back up.
Now using file manager go to windows partition then copy your files and paste them on the flash drive.
(if windows partition doesn't show up in the file manager you have to mount the partition. It's name is sda1 or sda2, etc. Run

sudo mount /dev/sda1

in a terminal. Try different numbers 1,2,3 until your windows partition shows up.)

Then shot down the computer. You have your data at hand.
The above instructions won't change anything on your hard drive. After you did this I'll tell you how to make the computer bootable.

Hi TheHimself,
I can boot from the ISO CD and I can happily access all the devices on my PC, hard disks and USB stick.
I have backups of most important things, and I can see that the windows system is all still there and OK.
All I need to do is to get a good grub (as I had before) that allows me to either boot Windows or Ubuntu

I'm presuming that before I attempted to put UBUNTU on the USB stick, the grub was on either my windows hard drive or my Ubuntu 9.04 hard drive.

That grub somehow got changed when I tried to set up the USB stick with Ubuntu.

Is there no easy way I can find & edit that grub to revert it back to how it was before?

Do I really have to start reloading the windows CD and changing things on the windows drive?

[Tufty]

I asked if your BIOS is capable of booting from USB and if it was to follow the suggestions.

See the above, unless you worded it incorrectly you did not boot from USB, you booted a Live CD and installed Ubuntu on the flash disk. That is not the same as booting from a USB or Flash disk!

If you do not want to take any risks then leave it the way it is.

I really am grateful for your help Presence1960
What set alarm bells ringing for me was when you said: "Boot your XP install disk and do this, following instructions for XP"

Yet when I follow the link for explanation, it says to boot from the Ubuntu install disk. Where does the Windows XP install disk come into the equation?
I certainly don't want to re-install windows.

[TheHimself]

What you need is

Recovery Is Possible

It's a small linux distro designed for situations like yours. You can get it from http://www.tux.org/pub/people/kent-r...looplinux/rip/

Download the one with X and Grub and using the instructions rip it on a CD or a usb drive. Then use it to boot your computer and once the desktop came up from the menu entry "partition editors" choose Grub (if your ubuntu is <= 9.04) or GRUB 2 (if its 9.10). It's easy to use. Follow the instructions "Do this first", "Do this second", etc. You must know in which partitions your windows and linux are located. The only tricky part is locating the Linux kernel. (The default option won't work). You should look in /boot/
and among files with "vmlinuz" in their name find the one which is the last version (biggest number). Then put its exact name in place of "vmlinuz" that the Grub programs gives you as default.

This won't do anything to your partitions.

[Tufty]

Thankyou for all the help. The solution was as follows:

1) Booted from Ubuntu 9.04 CD
2) sudo grub
3) find /boot/grub/stage1
This gave "(hd1,0)"
4) root (hd1,0)
5) setup (hd0)
6) quit
7) sudo reboot

These commands set the system back to how it was before I installed 9.10 on the USB stick.

Thanks Guys, apologies if I was a bit thick & nervous about further playing with USB stick & Windows setup CD's.

Dave.

[presence1960]

Thankyou for all the help. The solution was as follows:

1) Booted from Ubuntu 9.04 CD
2) sudo grub
3) find /boot/grub/stage1
This gave "(hd1,0)"
4) root (hd1,0)
5) setup (hd0)
6) quit
7) sudo reboot

These commands set the system back to how it was before I installed 9.10 on the USB stick.

Thanks Guys, apologies if I was a bit thick & nervous about further playing with USB stick & Windows setup CD's.

Dave.

There were no hard feelings- I am referring to a previous post on the first page of this thread.

I said leave it the way it is if you don't want to take a risk because troubleshooting any problem involves a certain amount of risk, you never know what can happen or go wrong. Glad you got it working.

P.S. I had similar as part of my fix except i had setup (hd1) because I was going to have you put GRUB on 9.04 disk MBR and switch the boot order in BIOS. That's why I was having you restore XP's bootloader to sda. I prefer to have each OS have it's own bootloader on MBR when the OSs are installed to different hard disks.

[presence1960]

I really am grateful for your help Presence1960
What set alarm bells ringing for me was when you said: "Boot your XP install disk and do this, following instructions for XP"

Yet when I follow the link for explanation, it says to boot from the Ubuntu install disk. Where does the Windows XP install disk come into the equation?
I certainly don't want to re-install windows.

if you scroll down when you go to the link you will see there are instructions to restore bootloader for XP & Vista. see here: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1014708

[Satori80]

Okay, I just did the exact same dumb thing to my laptop but I'm using 9.10 and I can't seem to fix it.

I tried that RIP cd with GRUB2 to try and fix it. Now the laptop tries to boot but I get a kernel panic because it can't seem be able to read reiserfs. How do I get it to load the initrd.img file?

I'm very tempted to go back to LILO at this point. I've never been able to make any sense of GRUB for some reason.


EDIT: Never mind! I got it. It actually was as easy as LILO Thanks anyway.

[llazarte]

Hi, can you help me by describing how you installed lilo?

I have the same problem. I installed 9.10 UNR and I suspect my old grub was substituted with grub2

I can boot from a USB stick with 9.04.

When I try to run grub, it complains that it cannot find /boot/grub/stage1 (which, in fact, isn't there).

And I don't find lilo on my USB distro.

Thanks for any help!

[Satori80]

Sorry, I didn't mean I installed LILO, I meant editing grub.cfg to load initrc was as easy as using LILO. I'm still using Grub.

If 9.10 is what you have installed, you are going to have trouble using 9.04 to fix it because they do use different Grub versions. The Recovery Is Possible CD TheHimself talked about earlier in this thread is the way to go, I think. Actually, you can boot it from USB as well if you prefer.

Once I got Kubuntu 9.10 bootable again I did "sudo apt-get install --reinstall grub-pc" to get the boot-loader back to how it was when I first installed it (grub-pc is what Ubuntu calls the Grub2 package... for some reason).

Hope that helps.

EDIT: Actually I'm new at Ubuntu -- or any pre-compiled distros for that matter -- so I'm sorry if I'm terse. I started with slackware 'way-back-when' to play around with Linux, but when I really started using Linux for day to day use, I started first with LFS and then moved to Gentoo, so, I must apologise that I assume a lot.

I might be new to Ubuntu but I do know a bit about Linux so if you need any more help, please say so.

I never did use Grub until now though so I'm no expert -- and Ubuntu uses a very strange (read: non-standard) way of implementing it that I've almost sorted out.

Then again... I still prefer VI to write text and bash scripts so... maybe I wouldn't be much help with Grub in and of itself, but I would be happy walk you through exactly what I did in more detail if that's what you would like.

But as far as I can see the Grub "rescue" prompt is a myth. It would not read any of my partitions, no offence meant to Tufty. It just didn't work at all for me and never has. It's why I've always stuck with LILO until now.

[llazarte]

Thanks, Satori80, for you answer.

Sorry, I didn't mean I installed LILO, I meant editing grub.cfg to load initrc was as easy as using LILO. I'm still using Grub.

If 9.10 is what you have installed, you are going to have trouble using 9.04 to fix it because they do use different Grub versions. The Recovery Is Possible CD TheHimself talked about earlier in this thread is the way to go, I think. Actually, you can boot it from USB as well if you prefer.

Once I got Kubuntu 9.10 bootable again I did "sudo apt-get install --reinstall grub-pc" to get the boot-loader back to how it was when I first installed it (grub-pc is what Ubuntu calls the Grub2 package... for some reason).

Hope that helps.

EDIT: Actually I'm new at Ubuntu -- or any pre-compiled distros for that matter -- so I'm sorry if I'm terse. I started with slackware 'way-back-when' to play around with Linux, but when I really started using Linux for day to day use, I started first with LFS and then moved to Gentoo, so, I must apologise that I assume a lot.

I might be new to Ubuntu but I do know a bit about Linux so if you need any more help, please say so.

I never did use Grub until now though so I'm no expert -- and Ubuntu uses a very strange (read: non-standard) way of implementing it that I've almost sorted out.

Then again... I still prefer VI to write text and bash scripts so... maybe I wouldn't be much help with Grub in and of itself, but I would be happy walk you through exactly what I did in more detail if that's what you would like.

But as far as I can see the Grub "rescue" prompt is a myth. It would not read any of my partitions, no offence meant to Tufty. It just didn't work at all for me and never has. It's why I've always stuck with LILO until now.

Past: I regained access to my Netbook by booting with my old USB with Ubuntu 9.04 and reinstalling grub (the old one), using a backup of menu.lst which I had (the upgrade trashed my good menu.lst).

1. Boot USB Ubuntu 9.04
2. Mount my Ubuntu 9.10 partition (on my case: mount /dev/sda5 /mnt)
3. Copy backup menu.lst to /mnt/boot/grub
4. Edit menu.lst to reflect the new kernel (2.6.31.14)
5. Install grub. I don't remember the exact command, but it was something like "grub-install root=/mnt /dev/sda"
6. Reboot

It did work, and this installation introduced a warning to install Grub2 once it was working. Is also created a first line on the boot menu, to chain boot to Grub2 (I suppose that will be helpful when testing if Grub2 is working).

Future: I suppose I will have to study Grub2 to make it work without it leaving me out of my computer. Any suggestion as to the best way to either reinstall, configure or update Grub2? Perhaps reinstall grub-pc?

Thanks again,
Leonardo