GRUB badly broken during upgrade

[Kevin O'Gorman]

On Mon, Oct 8, 2012 at 9:06 PM, NoOp <glgxg at sbcglobal.net> wrote:
> On 10/08/2012 03:21 PM, Kevin O'Gorman wrote:
>> On Mon, Oct 8, 2012 at 3:03 PM, Kevin O'Gorman <kogorman at gmail.com> wrote:
> ...
>>> The grub menu shows 11 items.  Kernels are in normal/rescue pairs
>>> 1,2) Unusable boot to a 3.0.0 kernel.  the "linux" line explicitly has
>>> root=/dev/sda7 which may explain its being dead; the drive with a
>>> partition 7 more frequently comes up as sdb, but has been sda in the
>>> past.  3.0.0 is an appropriate kernel for Ubuntu 11.10, which is
>>> what's on sdb7.
>>> 3) "Previous versions" legend line
>>> 4,5) memtest.  This operates normally
>>> 6,7) 3.2.0-31-pae kernel.  root=UUID of the sdb2 partition.  That's
>>> what i'm running now.  free(1) shows 8GB ram.
>>> 8.9) as 6&7, but it's the generic kernel which only sees 3 GB ram
>>> 10,11) as 8&9 (generic) an older kernel version.
>>>
>>> I think 1&2 may be fixable if I can get them to use the UUID.  In GRUB
>>> 1 I could do this manually.  I don't know how to do it in GNU GRUB.
>>> I'm going to ditch 8-11 as useless.
>>
>> I ditched the generic kernels and rebooted.  Boot was normal (of
>> course I had to select line 6).  Lines 8-11 are still there, which
>> makes no sense because the kernels they refer to are gone.  I have no
>> idea how to fix this, but it's not important.
>>
>> What would be much better would be to make lines 1&2 functional.
>> Then it would be nice to swap the contents of 1&2 with 6&7.
>>
>
> Why don't you just reinstall grub to whichever device(s) you boot to? I
> fail to understand using SuperGrub et al when this list is full of
> advise on how to simply reinstall grub/grub2 from a LiveCD. Ditto for
> checking UUID's.

Short answer: When I did that, I wound up with an unbootable
configuration.  Or at least that's what I think happened.  It got
pretty confusing with three (four?) different sources of GRUB and not
knowing which one did what.  The advice I got here about GRUB did not
prevent that.  I had tried installing GRUB from a 12.04.1 live disk
too, and that did not help.  What eventually got me back in operation
was a complete reinstall of 12.04.1, while leaving the 11.10
unbootable but present.

Sometimes, "just do it" does not work well.

At the moment I have a system that sort of works,  but has a few
quirks like an unbootable install.  At the moment, I'm trying to
identify the details what the quirks are without stirring the pot in a
way that will make this unbootable again.  I hope that with a better
understanding, I'll be better prepared for any chaos that might
ensue...

-- 
Kevin O'Gorman

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