Need to recover from an ID-10-T error.

[Rashkae]

UNGER, JOHN WM wrote:
> Thanks, Steve.
> 
> I tried the supergrubdisk - no joy. I may just have to tar all my files & reload Ubuntu 8.04.
> 

Nonsense, but you should back up data files in case my directions go
astray somehow,, it's been a while since I've done this and I'm
paraphrasing from memory. (Translation: wait a few hours for kind souls
to point out what I get wrong)

I'm assuming your /boot and / are on the same hard drive, and this is
the hard drive your bios boots from.  Otherwise, it's just a bit more
complicated.

Disconnect any other HD that might be in your system.

You need to know what partition your /boot is in.  In most cases, the
grub partition number is 1 less than Linux partition number.  Ex: if
/boot is in /dev/sda1, that will be partition 0 for grub.

Boot from a boot cd with grub.  It can be your Ubuntu install cd, or
super grub disk, or system rescue disk, or Knoppix, whatever.

from a terminal, type grub to start the grub interactive shell (the
ability to install grub this way is what I really miss most from grub 2.)

Issue the following commands:

device (hd0) /dev/sda

root (hd0,0)

## Note: in this case, the second 0 is the partition number.  I'm also
assuming the hard drive is either the Primary Master IDE drive, or
connected to your mobo's first SATA connector, usually labelled SATA1

setup (hd0)

quit  ## or exit, of quit doesn't work

Reboot and you should be off to the races, if all that worked.


PS: is there a reason you want a dedicated /boot partition?  They
generally aren't needed anymore unless:

You want to boot and install grub on a HD other than the one with your
root filesystem, or your root filesystem is something really new and/or
exotic that is not supported by Grub.