Restore GRUB to a non-booting system. A mini How-to

Monday September 17, 2007

Well I can report success of a kind with GRUB.

For the last couple of weeks I have been unable to boot anything off my hard drive, and have been surviving with a LiveCD Linux running - mainly PCLinuxOS - and last night all the stuff I have been reading about GRUB finally clicked into place and I was able to boot back into my original OS - Linspire 5.0.59 - which I am now using.

All I had to do was run GRUB in a Konsole window and do this : --

Open a Konsole window and type 'grub'

[code]paul@PAULS:~$ grub

Probing devices to guess BIOS drives. This may take a long time.

paul@PAULS:~$

[/code]

The Konsole window shows the above, temporarily, then it brings up GRUB in something like a CLI, like this : --

[code]

 [ Minimal BASH-like line editing is supported.  For the first word, TAB

   lists possible command completions.  Anywhere else TAB lists the possible

   completions of a device/filename. ]

grub>

[/code]

I then typed in the 'find' command with the full path/file-name that I wish to locate. This tells me which partitions are bootable with GRUB.

Since I had my GRUB boot-floppy in the drive, it found that as the first option, then four partitions with Linux installations.

[code]grub> find /boot/grub/menu.lst

(fd0)

(hd0,5)

(hd1,1)

(hd1,7)

(hd1,10)

grub>[/code]

Then, since the installation I wished to run is hda6 or (hd0,5) in GRUB notation, I set this as the root partition. I typed : --

[code]

grub> root (hd0,5)

Filesystem type is reiserfs, partition type 0x83

[/code]

Then I ran the GRUB setup, to write to the MBR on that drive.

[code]

grub> setup (hd0)

Checking if "/boot/grub/stage1" exists... yes

Checking if "/boot/grub/stage2" exists... yes

Checking if "/boot/grub/reiserfs_stage1_5" exists... yes

Running "embed /boot/grub/reiserfs_stage1_5 (hd0)"... 18 sectors are embedded

.

succeeded

Running "install /boot/grub/stage1 (hd0) (hd0)1+18 p (hd0,5)/boot/grub/stage2

/boot/grub/menu.lst"... succeeded

Done.

grub>[/code]

To exit from GRUB, back into the normal Konsole window, type 'quit'. With this result : --

[code]paul@PAULS:~$ grub

Probing devices to guess BIOS drives. This may take a long time.

paul@PAULS:~$

[/code]

That is my Konsole session, now complete. The 'Probing devices to guess BIOS drives' did not take long at all. Just a few seconds.

I then rebooted and was able to choose this installation and run it.

Now all I have to do is edit the menu.lst with the info. for the other installations and I should be sweet.