GRUB badly broken during upgrade

Kevin O'Gorman kogorman at gmail.com
Fri Oct 5 22:53:26 UTC 2012


On Fri, Oct 5, 2012 at 2:40 PM, Kevin O'Gorman <kogorman at gmail.com> wrote:
> I had a system with a working Ubuntu 11.04 and Xubuntu 12.04.
> I went to upgrade the Ubuntu to 11.10, and all seemed well until I
> went to reboot.
> It got confusing after that.  It looked like all of the right kernels
> were listed, but they all went to the same root.
> I got in a rescue mode, and tried another update-grub.  Again it
> seemed to work, but now grub goes directly to
>   grub rescue>
> and I have no idea what to do there.  So I'm writing this on another
> system, on which I'm not likely to upgrade the Ubuntu any time soon
> 8o)
>
> I have bootable CDs of all of the related versions.  I'm generally
> competent at admin tasks, but only if I have a  working Linux under
> me.  For this, I need help.
>
> Thanks for any help.

Update: I researched GRUB a little. I can now get the grub rescue to
restore its 'normal' module, and boot a rescue kernel, which I can get
into a root console session of the just-upgraded Ubuntu.
NOTE: here's where I'm really glad I give root a password.  The kernel
requires a root password for this to work.

The filesystems are okay.  grub-install and update-grub complete and
appear okay, but the result is the same.

I haven't figured out how to make it boot into Xubuntu, which I think
is a bit more stable.  If all fails, I'll reinstall Xubuntu, which
will presumably repair GRUB, but I'd much rather just get GRUB to boot
into it as it is.



-- 
Kevin O'Gorman

programmer, n. an organism that transmutes caffeine into software.




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