Compaq notebook

[Tom Davies]

Hi :)

I am fairly sure you are right about not being able to use those commands but i 
am not sure why they are not accessible yet.  To fix the Grub2 i tend to find 
an 
easier method is to boot-up any LiveCd that has Grub2 on it.  I tend to use 
Ubuntu 10.04 only because it's the distro i am most familiar with and then use 
this part of the 1st guide
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Grub2#Reinstalling%20from%20LiveCD

You have already done step3 so given the partition layout you mentioned the 
step 
4 command would probably be


sudo mount /dev/sda7 /mntand that gives us step 5 as


sudo grub-install --root-directory=/mnt/ /dev/sda

then reboot the machine.  It should be only able to boot into the linux distro 
you installed on your hard-drive but it may already have the Windows listed.  
Even if Windows is listed still just boot into your linux distro.  Now for step 
7 just get to a command-line again and try

sudo update-grub

which should now look only at local files and local hardware and should just 
find all the Operating Systems you have installed.  You might want to re-edit 
the Grub2 menu and put one of the Windows at the top of the list and make it 
the 
default just in case non-linux users try booting up the machine.

I don't know why i prefer that part of that help file when the gui method 
described immediately afterwards has screenshots.  Usually i tend too prefer 
gui 
methods.
Anyway, i hope something there helps!  
Good luck and regards from
Tom :)





Greetings.

My machine, a Compaq notebook, has become unbootable - almost - due to
a set of circumstances I'll describe later.  First, though, here where
things now stand.

The MBR of the internal drive has what I believe to be a good copy of
GRUB2 (though it's not acting as I would expect - more on that subject
also a bit later), and several partitions, including several for
Windoze (which I'm using now to write this plea for help), and three of
special interest:

  /dev/sda6 (previously known as /dev/sda8): ext4 file system
  
  /dev/sda7 (previously /dev/sda6): ext3 Linux /boot partition
  
  /dev/sda8 (previously /dev/sda7): Linux swap partition
  
  My problem is that GRUB knows about these file systems under their
  previous names, not the new ones. 
  Here's what happened...
  
After a recent install of Ubuntu, I began installing software using
  apt-get.  However, I didn't know that the /boot partition would be
  used during that process, so I had only allocated 80MB, which I
  discovered in the process of updating the system is insufficient.
  Since the /boot and swap partitions were immediately adjacent to one
  another, I carved a bit off of swap to give to /boot, so it would
  have 200MB, which seems sufficient.  That part worked fine - I backed
  up everything in /boot, freed the space in both partitions, using
  fdisk, re-partitioned and restored the previous contents of /boot. So
  far, so good.  Then I tried rebooting, and found myself looking at a
  GRUB rescue prompt.  After booting into Knoppix using a USB stick, I
  saw that the partitions had been re-arranged as indicated above.
  I've spent time poring over various descriptions of how to recover
  from such a situation, including an article at:

  https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Grub2

which, though helpful in some general ways, leaves me somewhat
confused.  The claim is made in the article that, though the grub2
rescue mode has a reduced command set, it includes commands like
"help," "cat," "linux" and "reboot," none of which are actually
available.

I was finally able to boot into Windoze using the advice in a GRUB2
manual I got on this site - at http://gnu.org/software/grub/manual/
using:

  set prefix=(hd0,x)/grub
  set root=(hd0,x)
  insmod normal
  normal

("x" being "7" in my case, to boot from /dev/sda7).

I could select the partition containing Windoze, but not the Linux one,
for reasons I can understand that have to do with incorrect device
names being encoded into the "grub.cfg" file.

Here's how the partition table looks, as fdisk sees it:

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sda1   *           1          26      203776    7  HPFS/NTFS
Partition 1 does not end on cylinder boundary.
/dev/sda2              27       28622   229697339+   f  W95 Ext'd (LBA)
/dev/sda3           28623       30389    14180352    7  HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda4           30389       30402      105656    c  W95 FAT32 (LBA)
/dev/sda5              27       10406    83377318+   7  HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda6           11202       28622   139934151   83  Linux
/dev/sda7           10407       10432      208813+  83  Linux
/dev/sda8           10433       11201     6176961   82  Linux swap /
   Solaris

The /mnt/boot/grub/grub.cfg file is shown at
http://pastebin.ca/1943856 .

If I try to boot from the Linux partition, which is the first shown in
grub.cfg, and go into edit mode, I see that the boot device is
identified by means of a UUID designator, which is something I don't
understand at present.  I tried replacing both the device name ("sda6"
to "sda7") and the UUID name in that edit session and rebooting, but
nothing useful happens (I don't recall at this point exactly what
happened, except that it wasn't a boot into Linux). Here's a snippet
from "grub.cfg": insmod ext2 set root='(hd0,6)' search --no-floppy
--fs-uuid --set 23fdef48-e848-4c3f-9001-efe958b8cdf7 set
locale_dir=($root)/grub/locale set lang=en insmod gettext

Someone in an IRC channel suggested I try using "Super Grub
2" (http://www.supergrubdisk.org/).  Though it gives me some
interesting information, I haven't yet figured out how to use it to
solve my problem.  I intend to go back to it while waiting for replies
to this trouble report, however.  (I found a note in the Wiki that
serves as documentation for Super GRUB 2 that it can't deal with
separate boot partitions (which I'm using because I hope to eventually
be able to replace the file system I'm using with a KVM volume, so I
can use encryption - however, for the time being, I've copied what's
in /boot into the /boot directory on that file system, so it would be
possible to boot from /dev/sda6).

I should also mention that I understand, from the help.ubuntu.com
article and elsewhere, that it is not possible to simply edit the
"grub.cfg" file the way that was possible with respect to "menu.lst"
under plain old GRUB.  However, the "update-grub" command seems to not
take an argument, so it's seemingly not possible to edit the file while
booted into another system, like the Knoppix live system I've been
using to poke around has made possible (and Knoppix only has an old
regular GRUB version of "update-grub" anyway).

My questions at this point are:

  1. Why don't I have access to all the GRUB 2 commands indicated in
     the article at https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Grub2 in GRUB2
     rescue mode?

  2. What's the easiest way to figure out what all I need to do to
     get myself back into a bootable condition, and what's the best
     procedure to use?

  3. Are there any other good resources anyone can recommend?

Thanks in advance for any advice or assistance!