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

[oldfred]

The Linux boot partition does not have to be the first partition and I do not like moving Windows partitions right. Windows is very partiticular about partition sizes. And any move of a partition or major resize requires good backups.

Your first install may have worked by coincedence. If the BIOS limit is the 137GB and partition spans that, you may install and have a working system but an update moves a new boot file beyond the 137 and you wonder why it stops working.

[bestinjames]

i've installe secure remix 13.04(64bit) and ran the boot repair because i was unable to boot to ubuntu. But the following message appeared.
"Please enable a repository containing the [grub2] packages in the software sources of Linux-Secure-Remix-64bit 20may2013 (sda4). Then try again."
but i'm unable to boot to it.
What to do?

[KamiKazeKenji]

The Linux boot partition does not have to be the first partition and I do not like moving Windows partitions right. Windows is very partiticular about partition sizes. And any move of a partition or major resize requires good backups.

Your first install may have worked by coincedence. If the BIOS limit is the 137GB and partition spans that, you may install and have a working system but an update moves a new boot file beyond the 137 and you wonder why it stops working.

Thank you for the advice. I got it working.

I made some space in my windows partition and shrank it to 100GB. I then moved my working Ubuntu partition (20GB) to the left. Then I made an extended partition for the new install - 1GB for /boot, 20GB for /, and 2GB for swap. I made sure to have the boot files within the first 137GB, and it seems to have worked!

This got me curious though. Why 137GB? It seems like a random number to me.

[oldfred]

There also is a bunch of other limits, I remember the 8GB one causing lots of issues.
http://tldp.org/HOWTO/Large-Disk-HOWTO-4.html

ATA Specification (for IDE disks) - the 137 GB limit
At most 65536 cylinders (numbered 0-65535), 16 heads (numbered 0-15), 255 sectors/track (numbered 1-255), for a maximum total capacity of 267386880 sectors (of 512 bytes each), that is, 136902082560 bytes (137 GB). In Sept 2001, the first drives larger than this (160 GB Maxtor Diamondmax) appeared.

Then we changed from setting CHS - cylinders, heads, sectors to match hard drive in BIOS to using LBA or Large where it makes it work. Newer systems now use AHCI.

The above shows some of the issues where BIOS had to be changed and kluges added to make BIOS work.

Now we have something new UEFI, but of course it is a lot different and many issues both by vendors, hardware drivers & Windows & Linux system configurations are being resolved.

[7LR7mKX]

Hi, I was going to install Ubuntu besides my Windows 8.1, but messed it up and started using the whole drive for the installation and then I halted the installation right away. That broke my MBR and everything so I tried and found the old files (it did not need a recovery for that). And now I can see the disks and partitions from my live Ubuntu but windows can not seem to do it, unfortunately I don't have a recovery disk as well. Although the boot-repair said that it did repair my boot, it seems not. Here is my log:

http://paste.ubuntu.com/6430391/

I've tried fixing partition table with testdisk and now I can see them which I wouldn't by the time this adventure started, thanks in advance.

Edit: I think I have to find a way to tell the system that the files are present there which it can not find. Here is a picture from the startup and Windows says it can not reach the file required (efi files maybe?)



Thank you

[oldfred]

@7LR7mKX
It looks like you have not recovered all the Windows partitions. The same system reserved often does not show correctly as it just is unformatted space that Windows has to have.
It looks like efi partiition has standard Windows boot files, but script only shows major files needed. Folder has lots of other small files like language and others.
You main install also looks like it has the winload.exe so it may also be ok.

It does look like you tried to install wubi. The download instructions clearly state that you cannot use wubi with gpt partitioned drives or any pre-installed Windows 8 system. Also wubi is being discontinued and the last supported version was 12.04.

Microsoft suggested partitions including reserved partition for gpt & UEFI:
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/l...8WS.10%29.aspx
Older Windows info on gpt - 2008 updated 2011
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/wind.../gg463525.aspx
Windows technical info on gpt and GUIDs
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/wi...sktop/aa365449
Order on drive is important:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microso...rved_Partition

If testdisk did not recover NTFS partitions exactly to original size, you have to run chkdsk from a Windows 8 repair flash drive. All NTFS partitions have inside the PBR or partition boot sector the same start and size of partition as partition table. If they do not match it will not work. chkdsk will fix that.

[7LR7mKX]

I thought having the Windows system on the drive and installing Ubuntu would solve the partition problem and went on to install it. Although I do see my partition which includes the Windows files in, I can not boot into it. I tried the boot-repair again and got an error saying it needed space +1 mb, then I ran it again so that I could get the paste. Here it says no Windows system was detected and it did not detect an .efi file which is located on sda2/shellx64.efi

http://paste.ubuntu.com/6432885/

Thank you for your response.

[oldfred]

Your first report showed Windows boot files in efi partition. Your new report only shows grub boot files. Did you erase the efi partition with the Windows boot files?
Boot-Repair may have saved a backup if you so specified.

You will need a Windows 8 repair Flash drive to restore Windows boot files. Boot-Repair can only make minor repairs to Windows and it primarily for fixing Linux or adding dual boot entries.

You still need the Windows system reserved partition and it must be in front of the Windows main install. So partitions on drive are not exactly as originally installed.

[kevang2]

Hi all,

I

* bought a new laptop (Asus R510C) with Windows 8 pre-installed
* installed Ubuntu 12.04 alongside it
* then could not boot Windows anymore: selecting Windows from the GRUB menu gave the "error: unknown command `drivemap'./error: invalid EFI file path."
* installed Boot-Repair and let it do the default repair action. It added two new GRUB entries that do work and successfully start Windows (Windows UEFI bkpbootmgfw.efi and Windows Boot UEFI loader). But:
* Now I cannot boot Ubuntu anymore! After selecting "Ubuntu, with Linux 3.8.0-33-generic" from the GRUB menu, the screen goes blank and stays that way.

I tried this and that afterwards, without success. Here is an up-to-date Boot Info Script (made using a Live CD): http://paste.ubuntu.com/6434249/

Any help appreciated! In particular, I'd like to know:

* Does this error possibly stem from the fact that the Ubuntu partition (/dev/sda8) is not within the first 100 GB of the drive? Boot Repair did warn me about this, but Windows does not seem to let me shrink the C: partition sufficiently...
* Is there any chance it might work with a later Ubuntu version, i.e. 13.10?
* Any other thoughts on what I should try next?

[oldfred]

@kevang2
I have not seen a newer UEFI system have issues with where the files are on the drive. It was some older BIOS and/or grub and maybe when installed on USB drives. So you should not have to move partitions around.

Boot-Repair ran the "buggy" UEFI where it assumes you have a UEFI that only boots Windows. It creates the bkpbootmgfw.efi file as the original Windows efi file and names grub2's shim to the Windows name.
If you can boot Ubuntu directly from UEFI menu then you should undo rename.
To undo & to rename files to their original names, you just need to tick the "Restore EFI backups" option of Boot-Repair.

You did install Ubuntu with signed kernel & grub. Do you have secure boot on? Have you tried both Ubuntu and Windows with secure boot off.

But did Ubuntu work before? Did you install video drivers? What video card/chip do you have?
Have you tried nomodeset, although Intel chips usually need different boot parameters.

How to set NOMODESET and other kernel boot options in grub2 - both BIOS liveCD & grub first boot ( also UEFI with grub)
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1613132
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/BootOptions

Boot-Repair adds correct entries because of this grub bug. The bug has been fixed, but is only in the very newest version of grub with updates to 13.10. So use Boot-Repair entries to boot.

I do not know if this applies but this work around is not to use secure boot.

grub-update fails to detect windows bootloader on a uefi system
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+s...b2/+bug/807801