5

Having tried all day to reinstall grub and trawling the internet I have had no luck. I can no longer boot into ubuntu and have tried boot disk frin yannubuntu but the grub tabs are greyed out. Other methods will not install it on sda1. I have no other os to boot into but have a live usb. Please help

Jorge Castro
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eekfonky
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3 Answers3

8

Try this to recover grub:

  1. Open the live version of Ubuntu (either burn the LiveCD or install the image to a bootable USB device using Startup Disk Creator);
  2. Open terminal and run sudo fdisk -l to see where Linux is installed on;
  3. Run sudo mount /dev/sdxY /mnt where x is altter and Y a number you have found in the previous step;
  4. Run sudo grub-install --root-directory=/mnt /dev/sdx to install grub;
  5. Run sudo update-grub to update grub;
  6. Run sudo shutdown -r now to reboot.
BsAxUbx5KoQDEpCAqSffwGy554PSah
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Black Block
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4

GUI way

In addtion to the other answers, a way with graphical user interface would be to boot from LiveCD or a bootable USB device (putting the live .iso on there with Startup Disk Creator Install usb-creator-gtk ). Once in the Live session you can install Boot-Repair:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:yannubuntu/boot-repair \
    && sudo apt-get update \
    && sudo apt-get install -y boot-repair \
    && boot-repair

Then start Boot-Repair from Dash and click "Recommended Repair" to start the repair or take a look at the other options.

Use at your own risk. The usual warnings with non-official repositories apply.

silexcorp
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con-f-use
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0

Not sure if this question is still relevant (it seems it's pretty recent).

I ended up here having had the same issue (managed to deleted grub by wiping a harddrive).

I found the following link to be supremely useful:

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1195275

Looks for section 13 "Reinstalling GRUB 2 from LiveCD".

In my particular case, I had W2K installed on my primary (boot) harddive, and installed ubuntu on a second harddrive later. As a result, grub was installed on the same drive that W2K was on - and allowed me to dual boot between the two.

I decided today that I could get rid of the W2K installation and use the disk space for something else. I stupidly erased the entire drive, including the bootloader...

I physically moved the disks around to ensure that the drive wth the ubuntu installation was the "primary" and used the steps at the link above to re-install grub... Bob's your uncle, I'm back in business.

Hope this helps someone.

Maarten
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