Can't boot after after update

[wah fun]

I am running 9.04 and let the system update. After that, I could no longer boot into ubuntu. I get an "error 11: unrecognized device string"

I have reinstalled 9.04 and before I let the system update again I thought perhaps someone could tell me if there is a problem with the updates or what I can do to ensure I can boot after the update.

Thx in advance for your help.

[stlsaint]

it appears that something went wrong with your menu.lst or partitions. You should be fine with updating this go around. I used to get that error when editing the menu.lst and adding a wrong structured stanza for windows. I wouldnt know why you would get it off updates. make sure that you are not trying to do an UPGRADE.
only use the update cmd when in terminal:


sudo apt-get update


also you can always get back to your filesystem using the livecd should you not be able to boot for some reason.

[ColdFFF]

"error 11: unrecognized device string" is a grub error message.

I think the most likely reason this happened is that when the system performed the update, it downloaded a new kernel and modified grubs menu.lst to use it.

Personally, I find letting it automatically update this file causes problems (multiboot machine), so I opt to modify it myself. NOTE: This isn't the hardest thing to do, but messing this up will also cause grub errors

To do this, when asked whether to keep the existing menu.lst or use the updated menu.lst, I keep the old one and gedit /boot/grub/menu.lst

Then I find the options, which look like:


title Ubuntu 9.04, kernel 2.6.28-14-generic
uuid 1093c86c-436a-4c52-98db-ea976cc433e5
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.28-14-generic root=UUID=1093c86c-436a-4c52-98db-ea976cc433e5 ro quiet splash
initrd /boot/initrd.img-2.6.28-14-generic
quiet

and change the kernel number to reflect the latest downloaded version like:

title Ubuntu 9.04, kernel 2.6.28-15-generic
uuid 1093c86c-436a-4c52-98db-ea976cc433e5
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.28-15-generic root=UUID=1093c86c-436a-4c52-98db-ea976cc433e5 ro quiet splash
initrd /boot/initrd.img-2.6.28-15-generic
quiet

This way it doesnt change the uuid by accident and shouldnt cause any problems. To find the latest kernel version I just look for the highest number of vmlinuz-xxx-generic in /boot/

[wah fun]

Thanks to all. Keeping the current menu.lst did the trick.