GRUB Error 5 - nothing will boot

[izziere]

My laptop has a single hard drive with 3 partitions: Vista, Vista recovery partition and Ubuntu 8.04. For some time it has booted well from GRUB.

I installed an XP VM on virtualbox and it all went well. When I shutdown, though, it would no longer boot up (and yes, the CD drive is empty!) I get GRUB Error 5 and then silence.

I believe I may have stuffed up the MBR.

So, here is the output of fdisk -l:


Warning: invalid flag 0x0000 of partition table 5 will be corrected by w(rite)

Disk /dev/sda: 160.0 GB, 160041885696 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 19457 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x447f284d

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 * 1 10629 85377192 7 HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda2 18008 19457 11647125 7 HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda3 10630 18007 59263785 5 Extended

Partition table entries are not in disk order


Now this morning there was an sda5.

As Google is apparently my friend I managed to find boot_info_script and this little gem, run via Ubuntu live CD says:


============================= Boot Info Summary: ==============================

=> Grub0.97 is installed in the MBR of /dev/sda and looks on the same drive
in partition #5 for /boot/grub/stage2 and /boot/grub/menu.lst.

sda1: __________________________________________________ _______________________

File system: ntfs
Boot sector type: Windows Vista
Boot sector info: No errors found in the Boot Parameter Block.
Mounting failed:
$LogFile indicates unclean shutdown (0, 0)
Failed to mount '/dev/sda1': Operation not supported
Mount is denied because NTFS is marked to be in use. Choose one action:

Choice 1: If you have Windows then disconnect the external devices by
clicking on the 'Safely Remove Hardware' icon in the Windows
taskbar then shutdown Windows cleanly.

Choice 2: If you don't have Windows then you can use the 'force' option for
your own responsibility. For example type on the command line:

mount -t ntfs-3g /dev/sda1 sda1 -o force

Or add the option to the relevant row in the /etc/fstab file:

/dev/sda1 sda1 ntfs-3g force 0 0
$LogFile indicates unclean shutdown (0, 0)
Failed to mount '/dev/sda1': Operation not supported
Mount is denied because NTFS is marked to be in use. Choose one action:

Choice 1: If you have Windows then disconnect the external devices by
clicking on the 'Safely Remove Hardware' icon in the Windows
taskbar then shutdown Windows cleanly.

Choice 2: If you don't have Windows then you can use the 'force' option for
your own responsibility. For example type on the command line:

mount -t ntfs-3g /dev/sda1 sda1 -o force

Or add the option to the relevant row in the /etc/fstab file:

/dev/sda1 sda1 ntfs-3g force 0 0

sda2: __________________________________________________ _______________________

File system: ntfs
Boot sector type: Windows Vista
Boot sector info: No errors found in the Boot Parameter Block.
Mounting failed:
$LogFile indicates unclean shutdown (0, 0)
Failed to mount '/dev/sda2': Operation not supported
Mount is denied because NTFS is marked to be in use. Choose one action:

Choice 1: If you have Windows then disconnect the external devices by
clicking on the 'Safely Remove Hardware' icon in the Windows
taskbar then shutdown Windows cleanly.

Choice 2: If you don't have Windows then you can use the 'force' option for
your own responsibility. For example type on the command line:

mount -t ntfs-3g /dev/sda2 sda2 -o force

Or add the option to the relevant row in the /etc/fstab file:

/dev/sda2 sda2 ntfs-3g force 0 0
$LogFile indicates unclean shutdown (0, 0)
Failed to mount '/dev/sda2': Operation not supported
Mount is denied because NTFS is marked to be in use. Choose one action:

Choice 1: If you have Windows then disconnect the external devices by
clicking on the 'Safely Remove Hardware' icon in the Windows
taskbar then shutdown Windows cleanly.

Choice 2: If you don't have Windows then you can use the 'force' option for
your own responsibility. For example type on the command line:

mount -t ntfs-3g /dev/sda2 sda2 -o force

Or add the option to the relevant row in the /etc/fstab file:

/dev/sda2 sda2 ntfs-3g force 0 0

sda3: __________________________________________________ _______________________

File system: Extended Partition
Boot sector type: -
Boot sector info:

=========================== Drive/Partition Info: =============================

Drive: sda ___________________ __________________________________________________ ___

Disk /dev/sda: 160.0 GB, 160041885696 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 19457 cylinders, total 312581808 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x447f284d

Partition Boot Start End Size Id System

/dev/sda1 * 63 170,754,446 170,754,384 7 HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda2 289,282,455 312,576,704 23,294,250 7 HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda3 170,754,885 289,282,454 118,527,570 5 Extended
Invalid MBR Signature found
Empty Partition


blkid -c /dev/null: __________________________________________________ __________

/dev/sda1: UUID="561A89B81A8995A1" TYPE="ntfs"
/dev/sda2: UUID="2C88743C8874071C" LABEL="HP_RECOVERY" TYPE="ntfs"
/dev/loop0: TYPE="squashfs"

=============================== "mount" output: ===============================

proc on /proc type proc (rw)
sysfs on /sys type sysfs (rw)
tmpfs on /lib/modules/2.6.24-16-generic/volatile type tmpfs (rw,mode=0755)
tmpfs on /lib/modules/2.6.24-16-generic/volatile type tmpfs (rw,mode=0755)
varrun on /var/run type tmpfs (rw,noexec,nosuid,nodev,mode=0755)
varlock on /var/lock type tmpfs (rw,noexec,nosuid,nodev,mode=1777)
udev on /dev type tmpfs (rw,mode=0755)
devshm on /dev/shm type tmpfs (rw)
devpts on /dev/pts type devpts (rw,gid=5,mode=620)
tmpfs on /tmp type tmpfs (rw,nosuid,nodev)
gvfs-fuse-daemon on /home/ubuntu/.gvfs type fuse.gvfs-fuse-daemon (rw,nosuid,nodev,user=ubuntu)


All-in-all, not a satisfactory day. Can anyone help me please?

[presence1960]

well your Ubuntu partitions are gone! They are no longer there. First you need to follow the advice given for sda1 and sda2. Boot the Ubuntu Live Cd and choose "try ubuntu without any changes". When the desktop loads open a terminal and run this command :
mount -t ntfs-3g /dev/sda1 sda1 -o force then look on the desktop for the icon for that sda1. Right click and choose unmount.

do the same for sda2 by running this command in terminal
mount -t ntfs-3g /dev/sda2 sda2 -o force Then look for the icon on desktop for sda2 and unmount it by right clicking and choosing unmount.

if the commands don't work because of permissions put sudo in front of them.

If this does not work I hope you made a set of bootable recovery CDs/DVDs prior to this. Because you can not mount your recovery partition to restore your factory image.

[izziere]

Thanks mate.

Mounting and unmounting worked, but GRUB was still throwing its toys out the pram, so out come the recovery disks.

Again.

Thanks for trying. Just glad I have all my files saved centrally on a server. Which reminds me, I must back them up this year.

[presence1960]

Thanks mate.

Mounting and unmounting worked, but GRUB was still throwing its toys out the pram, so out come the recovery disks.

Again.

Thanks for trying. Just glad I have all my files saved centrally on a server. Which reminds me, I must back them up this year.

GRUB will not work because there is no menu.lst since your Ubuntu partitions are gone.