<div dir="ltr"><div class="gmail_extra"><div class="gmail_quote">On Sun, Aug 10, 2014 at 8:46 PM, Kevin O'Gorman <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:kogorman@gmail.com" target="_blank">kogorman@gmail.com</a>></span> wrote:<br>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"><div dir="ltr"><div class="gmail_extra"><div class="gmail_quote"><div><div>On Sun, Aug 10, 2014 at 5:58 PM, Kevin O'Gorman <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:kogorman@gmail.com" target="_blank">kogorman@gmail.com</a>></span> wrote:<br>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"><div dir="ltr"><div>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.<br>
<br></div><div>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.<br>
<br></div><div>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.<br>
<br></div><div>End of complaining.<br><br></div><div>Now the problem:<br><br></div><div>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.<br>
<br></div><div>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.<span><font color="#888888"><br>
</font></span></div><span><font color="#888888"><div><br></div></font></span></div></blockquote></div></div><div>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 <br>
</div><div> update-grub<br></div><div>to refresh the GRUB on the 13.10 system i was running, and then<br></div><div> grub-install<br></div><div>to _all_ of my drives, so it does not matter which one the mainboard boots.<br>
<br></div><div>Now, all the versions of all the OS-en show up, and I can boot 12.04.1 or any other I like.<br></div><div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">
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</blockquote></div></div></div></div></blockquote><div>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.<br>
<br></div><div>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:<br>
<br></div><div>1, Boot a live Linux disk. The desktop install from any recent *Ubuntu should do nicely.<br></div><div>2. Open a terminal. The rest is all shell commands.<br></div><div>2. sudo -i #(All the rest needs to be root, and this saves some typing)<br>
</div><div>3. mount /dev/sd?? /mnt # where the ?? stands for the partition you want to boot to by default.<br></div><div>4. mount --bind /dev /mnt/dev<br></div><div>5. mount --bind /proc /mnt/proc<br></div>
<div>6. mount --bind /sys /mnt/sys<br></div><div>7. mount --bind /srv /mnt/srv # You're now ready to chroot<br></div><div>8. chroot /mnt /bin/bash - # or accept the default shell<br></div><div>
9. update-grub # verify that it finds the stuff you want to boot<br></div><div>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<br>
</div><div>11. /sbin/shutdown -r now<br><br></div><div>Your live disk will shut down. Follow instructions and reboot. You should get a working GRUB menu.<br><br></div><div>I sincerely hope you never need this.<br><br><br>
</div></div>-- <br><div dir="ltr">Kevin O'Gorman<br><br>programmer, n. an organism that transmutes caffeine into software.<br><span style="line-height:normal;font-variant:normal;font-size:10pt;font-style:normal;font-weight:normal"><span style="line-height:normal;font-variant:normal;font-size:10pt;font-style:normal;font-weight:normal"></span></span><table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" width="448">
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