SOLVED Re: Trusty LTS install does not boot

[Kevin O'Gorman]

On Sun, Aug 10, 2014 at 8:46 PM, Kevin O'Gorman <kogorman at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Sun, Aug 10, 2014 at 5:58 PM, Kevin O'Gorman <kogorman at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>> I'm a little late to the game getting my 13.10 xubuntu system up to
>> 12.04.1 Trusty, but I started today.  I have a complaint and a problem.
>> They're not the same.
>>
>> The complaint is that the install process scared me, then turned out to
>> be feckless -- I can't boot into the new system.  The install took a while
>> to detect that I have multiple operating systems on this machine.  That's
>> very true, but the scary part was that as soon as I told it I wanted to
>> install alongside them rather than over them, it immediately began copying
>> files.  Where, I had to ask myself.  Eeeek!  I was expecting to be able to
>> direct the install to my brand new SSD disk (/dev/sdd) that I bought for
>> the purpose.
>>
>> I let the install proceed, figuring that the damage, if any, was already
>> done.  It turns out that the install took the rest of my /dev/sda drive,
>> all 1.36TiB of it.  This seems extreme.  But the final bit of complaining
>> is that despite reporting that it was doing grub-update and such, when I
>> went to reboot, I had the same GRUB menu as before -- no signs of 12.04 --
>> and the default took me right into my usual 13.10 system.  At least I still
>> have a usable system.
>>
>> End of complaining.
>>
>> Now the problem:
>>
>> I resized the OS down to 32.00 GiB, and copied it over to /dev/sdd1 using
>> gparted.  I can mount it and browse throught it.  But I'm not clear on how
>> to get it to boot.
>>
>> I think I've seen how-tos about that here an there.  I'll be googling for
>> such help.  I hope it works better than the procedure built into the
>> installer.  But I couldn't hold myself back from the above complaint.
>>
>> That problem turned out to be easy.  I think with my MSI mainboard the
> boot drive is not necessarily /dev/sda.  Then if GRUB is doing grub-install
> to /dev/sda it would be ineffective.  In any event, the fix was to do
>    update-grub
> to refresh the GRUB  on the 13.10 system i was running, and then
>    grub-install
> to _all_ of my drives, so it does not matter which one the mainboard boots.
>
> Now, all the versions of all the OS-en show up, and I can boot 12.04.1 or
> any other I like.
>
>>
>>
>> I take back the part about easy.  On doing a reinstall directly to the
partition I wanted it in (thanks, Liam), the result wound up in a GRUB
RESCUE>  prompt before even showing a GRUB menu.  Eeek! unbootable system.
If I had known which drive gets booted (it turns out to be /dev/sdb) I
could have avoided this.  But I didn't know, and here I was.

I spent some frantic minutes trying to make sense of various blogs and
other google results, with no clarity.  I spent more minutes trying to see
if I'd saved some old notes.  Then I remembered the gist of those notes and
was able to follow the following procedure, which may be of use to others
as hapless as I:

1, Boot a live Linux disk.  The desktop install from any recent *Ubuntu
should do nicely.
2. Open a terminal.  The rest is all shell commands.
2. sudo -i  #(All the rest needs to be root, and this saves some typing)
3. mount   /dev/sd??   /mnt  # where the ?? stands for the partition you
want to boot to by default.
4. mount   --bind   /dev    /mnt/dev
5. mount   --bind   /proc   /mnt/proc
6. mount   --bind   /sys   /mnt/sys
7. mount   --bind   /srv   /mnt/srv   # You're now ready to chroot
8. chroot   /mnt   /bin/bash   -     # or accept the default shell
9. update-grub                    # verify that it finds the stuff you want
to boot
10. grub-install /dev/sd?      # where the ? names the disk your system
boots from.  May not be sda, depending.  For me it was /dev/sdb
11. /sbin/shutdown -r now

Your live disk will shut down.  Follow instructions and reboot.  You should
get a working GRUB menu.

I sincerely hope you never need this.


-- 
Kevin O'Gorman

programmer, n. an organism that transmutes caffeine into software.
 Please consider the environment before printing this email.
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