Problem reinstalling Xubuntu 16.04

[MR ZenWiz]

On Wed, Apr 5, 2017 at 1:48 PM, Liam Proven <lproven at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 5 April 2017 at 22:35, MR ZenWiz <mrzenwiz at gmail.com> wrote:
>> I tried that with VirtualBox.  I had to look up how to attach a real
>> ("raw") hard drive, but it seemed to work.
>>
>> However, when I plugged the drive into the laptop, it did not boot.  I
>> rebooted from the flash drive to "try" Xubuntu, and it does not like
>> the hard drive format at all - it's not ext4 or vfat.
>
> Odd. I've done exactly this. I have an installation of Lubuntu 16.04
> on an 8GB USB key. It boots into a full local desktop, on any BIOS
> machine.
>
> N.B. Attach the entire USB key device -- not a partition
>
> http://liam-on-linux.livejournal.com/50416.htmln it.
>
> Run only in a VM when updating, or in a diskless PC, or else GRUB will
> add all the entries on your hard disk to the USB key's boot menu.
>
> But I can confirm it *does* work.
>
I believe you.  I may have mistyped something because one of my
desktop's hard drives got corrupted and I'm having to restore it.  2TB
drive that was about half full.  Ick.

However, I put the drive into my main notebook and installed Xubuntu
on it, then took it out and put back the correct one (for the
notebook) and that still works just fine.

I installed the drive into the problem laptop and it still won't boot.
It comes up in BusyBox after about a minute, but all the inidcators
mentioned there are correct - the UUID matches, all the files are in
the right place, but it won't boot.

I rebooted from the Live flash drive and did the recovery bit per the
instructions in AskUbuntu (mount the drive, mount-bind /dev, /proc,
/run and /sys, chroot to /mnt, run update-grub, exit and reboot) and
that did not work.

I added the step of reinstalling grub on the disk (/dev/sda), reran
the update grub, and it still fails.

I remain open to suggestions (please don't suggest I ditch the thing -
that may be next).

What logs might be useful and what would I look for?  I've never seen
anything quite like this before.

Thanks.

MR