GRUB badly broken during upgrade

[Kevin O'Gorman]

On Fri, Oct 5, 2012 at 3:28 PM, Avi Greenbury <lists at avi.co> wrote:
> Kevin O'Gorman 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.
>
> What do you mean by this? Each listing should generally be the same
> root (both by grub's definition of 'root' and the kernel's).

When I had just installed Xubuntu, the grub menu would show its
3.0.0-26 kernel at the first two lines, followed by memtest, then the
Ubuntu 2.6.x kernels with an explicit root for Ubuntu.  The 3.0.0
lines would boot to Xubuntu, and the 2.6 lines to Ubuntu.  I'd like to
get back to that state.


>> 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)
>
> Have you tried a grub1 CD, if you've one to hand?

I do not have one.  I have a working Ubuntu laptop -- could it burn
one?  How would that be useful?
As I updated, I did have a little success with GRUB rescue, but
there's more to do.

>
> --
> Avi


Thanks,

++ kevin


-- 
Kevin O'Gorman

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