Serious GRUB booting problem after install Ubuntu 9.10beta for testing it.

[Goh Lip]

Joseph Cooper wrote:
> OK, your help is much appreciated. If anyone can help with the other 
> questions, that would also be a great help; I have yet to try the 
> suggestion given as my first live CD did not appear to work so I am 
> burning another.
> 
> On Mon, Oct 12, 2009 at 10:48 PM, Rashkae <ubuntu at tigershaunt.com 
> <mailto:ubuntu at tigershaunt.com>> wrote:
> 
>     Joseph Cooper wrote:
>      > Thank you very much for your reply Rashkae. In that case, will
>     the Karmic
>      > beta CD not be able to do this as it uses Grub 2? That's what I'm
>     running
>      > from now, it's the only live CD I have on me as I have just moved
>     up to
>      > university and made the terrible mistake of leaving my stack of
>     live CDs in
>      > my home country! I'm going to try booting Karmic from the flash
>     drive I just
>      > formatted with USB-Creator and then burning a fresh Mint CD.
>      >
>      > For future reference, is there something I did wrong that caused
>     my MBR to
>      > be overwritten? As far as I knew I wasn't touching my internal
>     drive and was
>      > entirely working with my external. But Ubiquity seems to have
>     changed and
>      > did the partitioning earlier than I expected which caught me out and
>      > required me to backtrack.
>      >
>      >
> 
>     I doubt grub 2 will repair a Grub 1 installation.  It is more likely it
>     will try to replace all the grub files with itself.  In theory, that
>     should work fine, but I'm not familiar enough with Either Grub 2 or the
>     Ubuntu GUI install to answer any of your questions.  I only suggested
>     the easiest way for you to return to familiar footing.
> 
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> 
Joseph, I am not familiar with Linux Mint, but if it has a livecd
and if it is based on ubuntu 9.04 and if it is on grub-legacy, then

boot up on livecd, open a terminal,

$ sudo grub
 >grub find /boot/grub/stage1    ## do not type '>grub' ##

## this will output all/any partitions with grub-legacy say, (hd0,x).

then
 >grub root (hd0,x)      #### whatever that 'x' was for your linux mint##
 >grub setup (hd0)
 >grub quit


You're done.

Reboot without livecd.

Oh, if you want to install any Linux OS on external drive, and you want 
it to be mobile, do NOT overide MBR, install grub at external drive 
itself. During installation, after you've set manual partitioning, there 
is an "advance" button, set grub at sdb, (taking care it really is sdb, 
if you've other drives connected as well).
To boot external drive, most bios now let you boot from external by 
pressing either Esc, F8, F10 or F12. (find what that is in your computer)

Regards,
Goh Lip

ps: if you've grub2, instead of grub-legacy, follow Tom's instructions.