[PLUG] grub problems or is it the noobie administrator?

[John Jason Jordan]

On Mon, 09 Nov 2009 16:27:53 -0800
logical american <website.reader3 at gmail.com> dijo:

> Well, it looks like I shot myself in the foot good and need the 
> assistance of a person intimately acquainted with grub.
> 
> I allowed Ubuntu to upgrade from 9.04 to 9.10 on my Toshiba laptop, but 
> something went wrong with apt's autoremove configurator and some 
> graphics library files got removed, so that Ubuntu would NOT boot into a 
> GUI but stayed in run level 2.
> 
> I reformatted the hard drive and reinstalled Ubuntu 9.04 (with the idea 
> in mind of updating the 9.04 with my backup disk) and everything went 
> well. I then booted knoppix 6.01 in order to update all the folders on 
> the harddisk (two partitions /(root) and /boot) and rebooted only to run 
> in trouble during the boot sequence.  The UUID's didn't match and the 
> load failed, Ubuntu opening a maintenance session.  (well, I had 
> symbolically linked the wrong vmlinuz and initrd images in the root 
> partition to the boot partition)
> 
> Realizing that I needed to run "update-grub" on both the /boot partition 
> and the / (root) partition, I rebooted knoppix and mounted them as you 
> would expect and ran "update-grub" and the command seemed to work.
> 
> However booting still fails, although grub does display all 3 initrd 
> images, but says "file not found" after trying.  Is the MBR hosed?
> 
> I did follow the "fix" steps in Ubuntu, of
> 
> 1. grub
> 2. find /boot/grub/stage1
> 3. root (hd0,0) (which step #2 finds)
> 4. setup (hd0,0)
> 5. reboot
> 
> but no such luck.
> 
> I mounted the CD run only session of Ubuntu 9.04 and tried to mount the 
> partitions again, and run either the grub commands or the update-grub, 
> but with no success.
> 
> What am I missing?   I could reformat the hard disk again and reinstall 
> Ubuntu 9.04 but then I have a backup disk with 2 more changes in the 
> linux kernel which will have to be updated.  I really would like to get 
> Ubuntu 9.04 updated, then allow apt to update into version 9.10 again.

I am not intimately familiar with Grub, but I have danced with it on
occasion. I can offer a couple facts which may help.

First, you don't need to state the drive as a UUID. Grub is happy to
take regular nomenclature like "/dev/sda2" at least on the menu line.
But in case you want the UUID the following copy and paste from my
Cheatsheet file will get it for you (change "hda2" to whatever your
drive is):

Command to get UUID when fixing Grub menu.lst file:
sudo tune2fs -l /dev/hda2

Second, if you install Ubuntu 9.04 it will use regular Grub. If you
thereafter upgrade 9.04 to 9.10 Ubuntu will keep regular Grub. But if
you do a fresh install of 9.10 Ubuntu will use Grub2. I am not at all
familiar with Grub2, but I remember reading that drives now start with
1 instead of 0. Thus, what was hd0 in Grub has become hd1 in Grub2. But
I think the "/dev" nomenclature on the menu line remains the same.