2

I am having some large issues right now. I decided to go forward with a Windows 10 upgrade after it worked fine on my other dual boot. Of course, I knew that I would have to fix Grub in some way afterwards.

I got to grub rescue. Okay so I got out a live USB and installed boot-repair and ran it. I rebooted after it said the problem was fixed and the problem was not fixed.

I booted into my live USB again and checked partitions. I used to run Windows 8.1, Kubuntu, and Ubuntu MATE. From what I can tell, my Ubuntu partitions are gone and there is unallocated space where they were.

Does anyone know of a fix?

EDIT: Boot info summary isn't looking good. It says there are no linux systems installed. You can find it here: http://paste.ubuntu.com/14481248.

EDIT 2: I was able to get into Windows using SuperGRUB2Disk. Will a reinstall of Ubuntu fix Grub?

EDIT 3: This is my latest boot info summary after using test-disk and boot-repair. http://paste.ubuntu.com/14491353

3 Answers3

0

Windows has LONG had problems with extended and logical partitions. I've seen reports as far back (at least) as Windows XP of it trashing logical partitions in various creative ways. It seems likely to me that the Windows upgrade process ran afoul of this amazingly-unfixed long-term bug.

Before you re-install, especially if you have important user data in your Ubuntu installation, you might try running TestDisk from the Ubuntu installer in "try before installing" mode. Your fdisk output makes it clear that there's a big gap in your partition table, so chances are the entry for your Ubuntu partition was simply deleted, and the filesystem itself is intact. There's a good chance that TestDisk will be able to recover the partition. After that, there's a small chance that GRUB will just start working. If not (which is more likely), Boot Repair should be able to re-install it and everything should start up again.


EDIT:

Your post-TestDisk Boot Info Script output shows that what had been two Windows primary partitions (1 and 3) are now your first two logical partitions (5 and 6), and your original partition 2 is now missing. Windows can't boot from a logical partition, which may be what's causing your Windows boot problems -- or it could be that /dev/sda2 was your Windows boot volume, in which case the fact that it's missing is obviously not optimal. You can correct the primary-to-logical problem with my FixParts program (see the just-linked-to documentation for detailed usage instructions). This is part of the gdisk package in Ubuntu. Thereafter, I recommend you use fdisk in Ubuntu to re-create your original /dev/sda2 by creating a new partition from sector 718,848 to 541,059,589. Alternatively, you can try using TestDisk again, but you must be careful to tell it which partitions should be primary and which should be logical, so that it doesn't make the same mistake again.

Rod Smith
  • 45,120
  • 7
  • 66
  • 108
0

First thing you should know is what kind of disk are you dealing with: is a GPT disk or does it have a MBR? In both case I would recommend you use testdisk in order to recovery your partition table.

0

I gave up and wiped the disk. I've decided not to do a dual-boot as it's too complicated for me and I haven't found a good reason I need Windows on this laptop. (I have another one running 10.)