[Boot-Repair] Graphical tool to repair the PC boot in one click

[oldfred]

Everything sudodus has suggested should work and is what I would suggest.

http://www.sevenforums.com/

Did you also delete the swap partition? Windows does not see the Linux partitions and may not like being after the extended partition with swap, but it should install to any primary partition, formatted NTFS with the boot flag.

[honzi97]

Yes, there is only one partition on the HDD now. The partition is primary, NTFS and bootable

[ipeurtt]

Hi oldfred, guys,

I'm back!

I was able to follow your suggestions:

- cleaned up the computer
- made new partition where I moved /home to (I think I screwed something up here, as my data now occupies double the space...it probably has to do with the fact that my home is encrypted. But I'll work on this later)

now I'm using less than 10GB on my first partition, but I continue to be unable to get boot-repair to fix my system. Note that I can't set the lba flag using gparted.

Here's a copy of the latest boot-repair info:

http://paste.ubuntu.com/5790247/

Any suggestions as to what to do next would be appreciated. Maybe we can focus on fixing the grub first, and then we can look at the issue I have with the duplicate data on my new /home folder.

Thanks in advance

[oldfred]

You have a now invalid ppa which you need to remove.

http://ppa.launchpad.net/venerix

I do not know if that is the only issue or if something else is preventing boot repair from reinstalling grub.

[ipeurtt]

I removed the invalid ppa, but that doesn't seem to be the issue.

Here's the updated info from boot-repair: http://paste.ubuntu.com/5791263/

Thanks a lot for helping me with this!

[oldfred]

Boot-Repair is still seeing something not correct and you do not core.img nor grub.cfg in / partition. So it looks like grub never fully installed and it does not seem to want to let you install.

Are you repairing from a different version (old) than the install? Grub now seems to need the live installer used for repairs to be the same version unless you do a full chroot to reinstall from inside your broken system.

I think Boot-Repair has some help on chrooting or you can just do it. I like kansasnoob's chroot command as he has made it one line to paste, but you have to change his sda3 to your sda1. If the one line chroot does not work then you have to run each command.
After chrooting then update system and reinstall grub as in drs305's posts.

Reinstall grub2 - Short version & full chroot version
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Grub2#Reinstalling GRUB2
Grub2 info & full chroot version - also see METHOD 3 - CHROOT:
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Grub2#Recover Grub 2 via LiveCD


To chroot, you need the same 32bit or 64 bit kernel. Best to use same version.
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/BasicChroot
drs305 chroot to purge & reinstall grub2
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1581099
kansasnoob- full chroot one line version with &&---- change sda3 to your install
http://ubuntuforums.org/showpost.php...2&postcount=10
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1470597

[ipeurtt]

I'm using a 12.04 live usb, and that's the version I have installed

I followed drs305 instructions and I get stuck at step #4, when trying to install grub-common (see the attached image). This is the error:

The following packages have unmet dependencies:
grub-common : Depends: liblzma2 (>= 4.999.9beta) but it is not installable
E: Unable to correct problems, you have held broken packages.

It seems like the same issue boot-repair was complaining about

Any idea about what to do about these dependencies?

Thanks!

[ipeurtt]

I just tried installing grub-common using aptitude and I got the same error, but a little bit more info:

The following packages have unmet dependencies:
grub-common : Depends: liblzma2 (>= 4.999.9beta) which is a virtual package

[oldfred]

From chroot run these also

apt-get autoclean # only removes files that cannot be downloaded anymore (obsolete)
apt-get clean
#refresh
apt-get update #resync package index
apt-get upgrade #newest versions of all packages, update must be run first
#would upgrade you to the latest kernel in the repositories
#dist-upgrade is also able to remove existing packages if required
apt-get dist-upgrade
# fix Broken packages -f
sudo apt-get -f install
dpkg --configure -a

Then reinstall grub. It looks like purge of old version is done so that will not work again, but run it anyway.

apt-get purge grub grub-pc grub-common
mv /boot/grub /boot/grub_backup
mkdir /boot/grub
apt-get install grub-pc grub-common
grub-install /dev/sda
grub-install --recheck /dev/sda

[ipeurtt]

oldfred, this is screwed up...I ran all those commands and it stops at the same place:

The following packages have unmet dependencies:
grub-common : Depends: liblzma2 (>= 4.999.9beta) but it is not installable

I had run an apt-get update before following your instructions and it had fetched almost three times the amount of stuff:

Before: Fetched 213 kB in 5s (36.3 kB/s)

After: Fetched 87.6 kB in 7s (11.4 kB/s)

so, it seems a lot was cleaned up; unfortunately not what we want...

any other suggestion?

thanks a lot!