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I attempted to upgrade my Windows 7 to Windows 10 on a dual-boot ASUS U56E laptop. After about five hours of download/prep/install, like many other people, I found myself presented with the grub rescue prompt. After reading the other post on this issue, I tried the various suggestions. Here is the current data:

grub rescue> ls
(hd0) (hd0,msdos5) (hd0,msdos3) (hd0,msdos2) (hd0,msdos1) (hd1) (hd1,msdos2) (hd1,msdos1)

grub rescue> set
cmdpath=(hd0)
prefix=(hd0,msdos6)/boot/grub
root=hd0,msdos6

As people suggested, to find the current grub partition I tried:

ls (hd0,msdos1)/boot
ls (hd0,msdos2)/boot
...

But nothing I type results in a valid partition.

I tried booting off of a GRUB rescue disk and a Ubuntu ISO image disk, but while the drive spins, there is no attempt made to boot from the disks. The grub rescue prompt is almost immediately displayed after the ASUS splash screen.

I'm dead in the water now. Is there any way I can find the grub partition, or boot off the Windows MBR? Any help is greatly appreciated.

BTW, this machine was once used primarily as a Linux device but was taken over by a windows user. I would be happy to wipe the outdated Linux partition if it means getting access to the windows installation.

Jeffery Small
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1 Answers1

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oldfred, thank you for all the good suggestions and links. I'm reviewing them for future reference.

In the meantime, I did get Windows 10 to finally successfully install. The reason the recovery disks were not working was because the boot order had been changed in this machine to search disk before DVD drive and grub rescue was always grabbing control. I have never had a machine with this ordering so I was surprised that the DVD wasn't being accessed. Once this ordering was corrected in the boot prom, I was able to use the recommended repairs from the boot-repair-disk discusses here:

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Boot-Repair

After running this repair the machine booted directly into Windows and completed the upgrade. The one disappointment was that even though this was a GRUB repair tool, GRUB seems to be gone now, along with access to the old Ubuntu installation. I've rebooted a number of times and tried to drop into the GRUB menu during boot using the ESC key, but Windows always boots immediately, so I do not think GRUB is active any longer. This was fine with me in this case, but it would be a problem for others attempting the upgrade.

I don't know if this makes a difference, but this was a machine with a native Windows 7 installation which had Linux added later. Possibly the results would vary on a native Linux machine that was partitioned for Windows.

Jeffery Small
  • 103