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.
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