Can't boot a partition newly restored by clonezilla

[darkod]

Yes, if you don't customize the grub scripts to change the order, the top linux version is the main one.

I can't explain what you are saying about grub.cfg, it doesn't make much sense. If sda11 is your top version, then only the grub.cfg on sda11 should matter. When you run update-grub the os-prober does search for boot files of other OSs and makes an automatic entry for each found. All these entries go below the memory test entry in the boot menu (by default, unless customized).

update-grub usually does a very good job and that's why editing manually grub.cfg is not recommended. You can do it for troubleshooting purposes, but carefully. If you are not 100% sure your grub2 on the MBR is from sda11, you can try booting sda11 and running:
sudo grub-install /dev/sda

That will install it linking it to sda11.

We haven't addressed one important question, the UUIDs. Did you confirm you have no doubled UUIDs for the recovered partition? As I said, I don't know exactly how clonezilla does it. Have in mind that it's not designed to restore on the same disk next to the original partition. If the clonezilla restore uses the original UUID, that would mean you can end up with same UUID for two different partitions which will create confusion for both /etc/fstab and grub.cfg. Check the UUIDs with blkid and make sure sda11 and sda12 have different one.

[Ralph L]

darkod

Thank you again for your reply. You are correct about only the "main" grub.cfg being used for the boot menu. I think I see what happened to me. When I did the clonezilla restore partition on sda12, the sda12 partition looked exactly like the sda11 partition. The MBR must find the "main" partition by searching for a certain symbol (reference by symbol). Because I had two exactly the same partitions (with the same symbols), it must have found the symbol in sda12, and not looked any further, it built the menu from the sda12 grub.cfg. However, when I booted, since both partitions pointed to sda11, I always booted sda11. Then when I did update-grub for sda11, I wasn't updating the grub.cfg file that was being used for the boot. When I changed the sda12>grub.cfg to have the correct entry for booting sda12, booted sda12, and did update-grub, I finally updated the grub.cfg that was being used all along, and everything worked fine.

Oh, and I did have to change fstab in sda12 to have the correct UUID. So I now have a backup OS partition that I don't have to spend hours reconfiguring, if I mess up my daily use OS partition.

So I thank you very much for educating me. I am sure it will be very useful to me in the future, when I start chasing the boot problems on my Compaq Presario 2100. Hopefully you will be on-line and give me some advice on those issues also.

PS: I tried to support your Ubuntu membership, but the thread was closed. Good luck.

[darkod]

If you are in doubt sometimes which partition is mounted as /, you can check all mounted partitions in terminal with:
df -h

That will show what is mounted as / so you don't need to guess. Glad you got it figured out.

Don't worry about the membership application, I already got the membership and that's why they closed the thread. Thanks anyway.

[Ralph L]

See http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2124458 for detailed solution.

[justincarter]

Hey your problem have been solved or not ?

[justincarter]

menuentry "Daily on sda13" {
set root=(hd0,13)
linux /vmlinuz root=/dev/sda13 ro quiet splash
initrd /initrd.img
}

A menuentry like this should always use the latest entry:

menuentry "Latest Kernel in sda1" {
insmod ext2
set root=(hd0,1)
linux /vmlinuz root=/dev/sda1 ro
initrd /initrd.img
} It works .