Don’t touch grub unless you have a boot disk
Seriously, Grub is a boot to the head.
I rarely shut down my computer. It’s linux, and is pretty low powered, so I don’t really have to. Last night I did shut down my machine before I went to bed. I had been playing with and cleaning up my grub config last night.
For those of you who are new to Linux/Ubuntu Grub is the program that allows your computer to boot. It’s pretty important. And I broke mine :(
And it turns out that it’s pretty hard to fix grub when you can’t boot your computer far enough to manipulate the grub configuration files. There is a simple built in command line, but it’s pretty difficult to wrangle things in.
find /boot/v <–tab–>
The above command actually gives you a lot of really useful feed back, both in the tab completion and the result. It *should* spit out something like (hd0,5) which equates to hda5. My entry in my /boot/grub/menu.lst had (hd1,5) instead of (hd0,5). And that’s what prevented me from booting.
Luckily I had a livecd handy to get online and diagnose and find that find / command.
So don’t touch grub unless you read up on the matter first. Seriously. It will kick you in the head. With a boot…
Tom
August 2, 2008 @ 3:30 am
When on grub’s command-line, try:
configfile (hd1,5)/boot/grub/menu.lst
and it will load the menu you usually see. At this stage you can press ‘e’ to edit some of the entries.
If you do:
configfile (hd
It will list all hard drives, then once you had chosen which hard drive your /boot partition is, you can press again to see which partitions.
Needless to say, grub is pretty cool.