[ubuntu-us-ma] Broken Grub

[Daniel Hollocher]

>
> I installed the Natty Beta to a 16-gb flash drive, from an image of the
> live cd on a 4 gb flash drive.  The resulting system, on the 16 gb, works
> fine, but, I managed to break the boot partition on my hard drive, which the
> installer should never have touched.  I could only boot the Natty drive.
>

I'm guessing that you booted the installer, and just selected a partition on
the 16GB drive as the install point.  The installer doesn't recognize
removable media as removable; it just treats everything as a permanently
connected drive.  I'm guessing that it happily mangled your grub to treat
the flash drive as your main install.  Going into the advanced options and
making sure that grub is installed to the flash drive and not your HDD might
have avoid this problem.

I think in the future though, you should use the "Startup Disk Creator",
unless there is a reason that won't do.



> On discovering this, I opened a terminal on Natty, went Superuser, and
> chrooted into my hard drive's system.  There, I gave the "update-grub"
> command.  This spat out errors about no mount point for '/dev' and asked if
> '/' is mounted.
>

You need to mount /dev along with /dev/pts /proc and /sys with a command
like: sudo mount --bind /dev /mnt/dev

You can find these directions on how to setup a chroot for reinstalling grub
documented here, under method 3:
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Grub2#Reinstalling%20GRUB%202

For reference, if you wanted internet access under such a chroot, you need
to cp /etc/resolve.conf /mnt/etc/resolve.conf

Good luck,
Dan
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