SOLVED Re: Trusty LTS install does not boot
Kevin O'Gorman
kogorman at gmail.com
Mon Aug 11 19:10:16 UTC 2014
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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