Trying again: I installed grub twice on two drives, how to fix it?

M. Fioretti mfioretti at nexaima.net
Sun May 3 07:01:57 UTC 2020


Greetings,

two months ago, I asked the question below, but got no answers. Then
lockdowns came, and one of the consequences is that I had no way to
deal with it anymore. Now things are a bit quieter, and I would really
like to fix this for good. The problem is still there, exactly as
described below. Short version:

I had Ubuntu 19.10 on my laptop hd, added an SSD drive to it,
installed Ubuntu 19.10 on that SSD too. But I did some mistake, so now
I have 2 working ubuntu installs on both disks, and a grub that lists
them both, but by default points to the one on the HD. I want to have
Ubuntu and grub only on SSD, so I can repartition the whole HD drive
as /home.

Thanks in advance for your help,
       Marco
       
On Tue, Feb 25, 2020 09:26:53 AM +0100, Marco Fioretti wrote:
> Greetings,
> 
> Last month, I bought a used Lenovo T430 laptop with Windows on it and,
> since I needed Linux on it in a hurry, I installed Ubuntu 19.10 on it,
> alongside Windows, on its factory-installed hard drive.
> 
> Last week I finally had the time to mount an MSATA SSD drive into the
> laptop. The plan, taking into account advice received here on the list
> in previous threads, was/is to:
> 
> 1) install Ubuntu on MSATA/SSD Drive, with swap on it too
> 
> 2) keep windows and /home on previous hard drive
> 
> 3) as soon as I am sure I can get rid of windows for good (not now,
>    alas...) erase its partition, use that whole hard drive for /home
> 
> so I can keep system+boot info + swap on SSD and data on hard drive,
> totally separated
> 
> The problem is that during the installation I got distracted, and now
> I have (do not remember how/when/why, honestly) grub installed TWICE,
> both on old hard drive /dev/sda, and on SSD drive, /dev/sdb, pointing
> to two distinct Ubuntu installs, one per drive. For details, please
> see full output of bootinfoscript at
> http://zona-m.net/marco/bootscriptinfo.txt
> 
> In practice, now when I boot I get a grub menu giving me 3 choices
> (besides memtest, and safe/recovery options), in this order, all
> working:
> 
> * Ubuntu 19.10 on /dev/sda (old hard drive)
> * windows
> * Ubuntu 19.10 on /dev/sdb (new SSD drive)
> 
> I want, instead, to have only one grub only on MBR of the SSD drive
> (/dev/sdb), so the system boots even if I replace the hard drive
> (/dev/sda), and offering only two options, Ubuntu on ssd drive, and
> windows, until I erase it.
> 
> What is the best way to fix this mistake I made?
> 
> Thanks,
> Marco
> 

-- 

M. Fioretti http://mfioretti.com                   http://stop.zona-m.net

Your own civil rights and the quality of your life heavily depend on how
software is used *around* you




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