Hi Guys,
I'll start with an apology for how long this post is going to be, but of course that's just how it is sometimes, eh.
Having wanted to get a dual-boot system going for many years, I finally made it three and a half years ago. The thread immediately below this paragraph was part of the process. In a nutshell, I couldn't get Windows and Ubuntu to sit together harmoniously on the same disk, and so in the end I followed some clever advice to install grub at the beginning of the second hard disk. And yes, that worked! Eventually, anyway - I had to sweat plenty over it.
https://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2349225
This is what the two disks look like. The two OSes on sda, all data and other gubbins on sdb, with some partitions at the beginning of sdb which I assume are related to grub, but maybe not all (you tell me please!):
Screenshot from 2020-06-22 21-41-20.png
Screenshot from 2020-06-22 21-42-20.png
Everything was fine until I made the tragic mistake of trying to upgrade Ubuntu from 16 to 18, about a year and half ago. Of course I knew that I was in trouble when the upgrade froze at the point when it was supposed to be updating grub. I couldn't do much else other than restart the computer. Well, I could have taken a picture and written a post here, but that would have all taken too long I suppose. Anyway, I expected the absolute worst, but remarkably I was able to boot into Linux for a little while, after some panicky rescue attempts. Clearly a lot of features had been lost (I can't remember in much detail any more!), and it was not satisfying. And anyway, soon enough grub just failed, and I saw this:
grub_rescue1.jpg
I did write a post on here at some point in the month or two after this happened:
https://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2409387
Initially I got a reply, and a conversation started, but then the communication went dead, despite my shamelessly bumping myself up a few times. I suppose that the person who was replying either got sick or hopelessly busy with other stuff, and eventually I just gave up. I had enough other stuff going on, of course, and anyway, I could get Windows at least, by booting from the disk that both systems are on. Not ideal, obviously, but I survived until now.
However, I do very much miss having Linux, and of course Windows is super-annoying sometimes (but I don't quite feel ready to let go completely), so I really would like to get Ubuntu back on. Being one of those people placed in a VERY long and strange furlough period, I've decided to devote a couple of weeks of this time to sorting this problem out, and getting back into the Ubuntu spirit.
The way I see it, I have two options, which I will detail here, and seek advice from the collective:
..............
Option 1
Try to figure out what's wrong with GRUB, and get the original dual booting back:
I tried following this post:
https://unix.stackexchange.com/quest...-mod-not-found
Of course on that post they talk about normal.mod, Well, I'm apparently missing bufio.mod, and can't find anything online about what the difference is!!!
I've tried following the instructions as best I could, substituting bufio for normal (which of course I have no idea if it's right or wrong, but not too much to lose, eh). I can find the partition that (I guess) I need to be working on, as it's the only one that responds to 'ls':
2020-06-23 02.29.19.jpg
But following instructions from that previous link beyond that doesn't take me very far.
If it's really beyond salvage, no worries - I'll move on to Option 2 --->
...............
Option 2
... is to wipe the old Ubuntu partition and start again, with Ubuntu 20 this time. I've tried it off the USB, and can see some significant improvements, such as immediate detection of mount points, and I'm sure many other things that I don't know about yet. According to all the tutorials that I've found, it's all supposed to be child's play to get the dual boot to work.
Well, not child's play exactly, but the tutorials say that Windows 10 should be detected by the installation process, but instead of that, I'm getting this:
Screenshot from 2020-06-24 12-35-11.png
Is that going to change if I just delete the Ubuntu 18 and Swap partitions? Like I said, I don't really mind too much about losing that corrupted system and starting again.
The other question relating to that (maybe!) is the Legacy BIOS - UEFI issue. I don't really understand how this affects dual booting, and haven't found the information to explain that properly. I've taken screenshots of my settings from the boot manager, and I'll just stick them on here to see if there's one magic bullet!
Ah, I see that I'm limited to five pictures per post, so I'll have to put a second post with those. Sorry!
Bookmarks