[ubuntu-za] Grub2 and other problems
Miles
msdomdonner at gmail.com
Thu Sep 26 14:24:20 UTC 2013
I have a couple of old drives that give probs every now and again Bill.
with boot-repair and http://www.supergrubdisk.org/ i manage to keep them
going. you can even boot into the faulty ubuntu with the supergrub disk
then reinstall grub-pc and in synaptic reinstall everything it shows if
you type grub into the little search window at the top. even reinstall
mbr too. more good luck to you
> Thanks Miles - Boot-Repair does fix the Grub problem atfirst, but then
> it comes back again. I have to assume a hardware problem.
>
>
> On 25 September 2013 20:00, Miles <msdomdonner at gmail.com
> <mailto:msdomdonner at gmail.com>> wrote:
>
> On 25/09/2013 16:18, Bill Cairns wrote:
>> I have being trying to get my 5 year old Mecer machine going
>> again (it has been sitting gathering dust for a few months). But
>> I seem to go back two steps for every one forward.
>>
>> This machine used to run 10.04 with no problems. I had two hard
>> disks - a 160 GB drive (sdb) which I had partitioned sdb1 =
>> root, sdb2 = swap and sdb3 = home. Then a 500 GB drive (sda) that
>> I used as backup storage.
>>
>> I started off trying to install Ubuntu 12.10 because that is a
>> disk that I had easily available. It ran beautifully in live mode.
>>
>> The installation took forever - it seemed to get stuck
>> downloading updates to my existing packages. So I repeated the
>> installation without connecting to the Internet.
>>
>> Again the installation seemed to go fine, but the machine booted
>> to the point of asking for my password - it then refused to
>> accept my password and would not go any further. OK so perhaps I
>> mistyped my password or had a senior moment or something, so I
>> re-installed. Same thing.
>>
>> Hm. So I repeated the installation except this time I told it to
>> format sdb1. Things went better and the machine accepted my
>> password this time. In fact everything looked good and I thought
>> that I had a working Ubuntu system. So I thought it was time to
>> install all the updates that were missing. That took a few hours.
>>
>> But now I had a new problem. The Unity GUI kept on just vanishing
>> - the icons on the left and the tool bar on the top just vanished
>> leaving me a completely useless machine. Sure, I could get a
>> terminal window by CTl-ALT-T, but the terminal would not accept
>> anything that I typed. I had to push the power button to shut the
>> machine down and when I started it up again, the GUI vanished
>> within seconds of my logging in.
>>
>> I decided to cut my losses and start again. So I downloaded
>> Xubuntu 13.04 and tried it in live mode. It worked perfectly - I
>> was particularly impressed that it found my wireless card and
>> used it without problems whereas previously I had had to compile
>> the driver. I installed and the installation went through. But on
>> booting, I got the message "
>>
>> no such device d42bef6d ....
>> grub-rescue>
>>
>> This is the point at which I am still stuck. I have Googled this
>> and followed instructions to restore Grub, but get a variety of
>> error messages depending on the sequence that I follow. I have
>> tried telling the installer to forget the existing partitions on
>> sdb and to use the whole drive - no change. I still get the "no
>> such device" message.
>>
>> I am tearing my hair. How can a new installation not be able to
>> find Grub?
>>
>> I am beginning to assume that I must have a hardware error. Any
>> suggestions?
>>
>> Thanks,
>> Bill
>>
>>
>>
>>
> Hi Bill, I fix all boot-probs with a too called boot-repair,
> https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Boot-Repair
>
> Hope this helps you. Good luck.
> Miles
>
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