Re: : Grub2 made my systeum unbootable

On 21 Jul 2009, Florian Kriener wrote:
On Tuesday 21 July 2009 19:16:34 Anthony Campbell wrote:
Don't remember now about the boot message from grub, need to look, but if
it says grub instead of grub 2 in may be that the files installed are
from grub2 but the boot sector itself is grub ...

I think this may be what happened. The first time I booted after the
change to grub2 it was OK, but there was a message at the top saying I
could or should do "update-grub--- something or other" to install it in
the boot sector. I did that and then the problem appeared. I'm trying
to find a way back but I fear the worst.

Don't worry, it's just the boot manager. My guess would be, that Grub 2 is not
installed in the MBR, but Grub 1. And after running update-grub you removed
all Grub 1 modules and replaced them with Grub 2 modules. This indeed tends to
break the boot manager.

Since you said you have a rescue system at hand it should be quite easy to
bring your system back up. First boot into your rescue system, mount your file
systems to /target or whatever, bind mount /dev and /proc into it (just for
reference: mount -o bind /dev /target/dev) too and chroot into it (chroot
/target bash -i, or the like). Then run grub-install /dev/sda (or whatever
discs MBR you want to install it to) and update-grub. Check that device.map is
correct (if not correct it and rerun grub-install and update-grub). Check
grub.cfg too, just to be sure and reboot.

Feel free to ask again, if this did not work. It might be that I forgot
something.



Thanks, Florian; worked like a charm! I didn't even need to do the
chroot stuff because the Debian install disk mounts the file system for
you in recovery mode.

Anthony


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Anthony Campbell - ac@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Microsoft-free zone - Using Debian GNU/Linux
http://www.acampbell.org.uk (blog, book reviews,
and sceptical articles)


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