Interesting recovery frustrations

[Loïc Grenié]

2010/12/15 MR ZenWiz <mrzenwiz at gmail.com>:
> 1. First and foremost, why do we have such an unbelievably arcane
> method of influencing or controlling the boot process?  There isn't a
> single facility to display what grub will do or what its settings are
> other than to read the fairly complex set of files used to generate
> the grub.cfg file.  Even something as simple as a
> grub-show-me-what-the-heck-yo're-going-to-do-on-the-next-boot is not
> available.

    You've been beaten by 2 programs: grub and the linux kernel, not
  just grub. Boot menu not shown = grub, "not finding /" = kernel.

> 2. Is there a better way to recover form a situation like this (OS
> overwritten intentionally after being backed up, restoring the backup
> and not having it work)?  Obviously, not using the same root and boot
> partition would have been a better choice, but frankly I wasn't
> expecting this much of a headache getting back.

   dumpe2fs can show you the UUID of a partition:

sudo dumpe2fs /dev/disk/by-label/boot | grep -i uuid

  (it helps if the label of the partition contains only alphanumeric
  characters, in your case the label is probably something similar
  to \x2f or %x2f, just look inside /dev/disk/by-label). You can then
  hand-modify the <your boot partition>/grub/grub.cfg file.

     Hope this helps,

          Loïc