[ale] grub rescue

[Michael Campbell]

FWIW, after some scary episodes with dual booting and Windows' general
anti-social behavior with it, I've moved to running a Windows host and my
Ubuntu "machines" in a VM.  A Linux host with a Windows as a VM also works,
but for my use not as well.

With sufficient hardware, they run pretty well together, and I get the best
(or at least the necessary bits) from both worlds, simultaneously, and I
can even run my VM off a USB drive and carry it around with me and have my
complete environment wherever I go.

I use VirtualBox as my VM container.  No real problems so far to speak of.
 I'm a Java server side developer, so am running WebSphere tools and Oracle
on the VM as my day to day routine.


On Tue, Feb 21, 2012 at 3:51 PM, Rich Faulkner <rfaulkner at tux86.org> wrote:

> **
> ...and to think...Richard Stallman professed the use of "no password" as a
> password to keep systems open and free.  Unfortunately the word "ethical"
> is lost on too many in the world thus we are pressed to encrypt our file
> systems.
>
> Glad you got your partition mounted and files copied!
>
> As for making the drive bootable again...reinstall GRUB?
>
> Rich
>
>
>
> On Tue, 2012-02-21 at 15:28 -0500, John Pilman wrote:
>
> Here's an update on my progress with the scrambled partition table and
> encrypted home directory.
> Using dd I copied the hard drive and did the rest of this on the copy.
> I ran testdisk from a live boot usb flash drive and was able
> re-identify the unallocated partition as a linux partition and write
> the partition table.
> After a boot or two, gparted saw the partition as sda5.
> Long story short for now, Ubuntu 11.04 includes the ultility
> encryptfs-recover-private which was able to mount the encrypted
> /home/john and I have now copied my files.
> Caveat #1 - it took me a while to learn that my live boot usb Ubuntu
> 11.04 had to be 64 bit since my original partition was 64 bit.
> Caveat #2 - some of these steps were very time consuming.
>
> I next plan to try to see if I can make the hard drive bootable again.
>
> ...John
>
> On Sun, Feb 19, 2012 at 4:05 PM, John Pilman <jcpilman at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Thanks for the ideas. I am starting with a second hard drive and the
> > dd command as Derek said and I am going to try to recreate how I go
> > into this mess.  Understanding, at his point, is more valuable than
> > the little bit of data since my last last backup.
> >
> > To partially answer some questions:
> > The disk started with Windows 7 and I installed Ubuntu 10.10 with dual
> > boot.  So the partition utility is the one used during the Ubuntu
> > install.  Also, I vaguely remember a question about encryption during
> > that process.  I can't say for sure whether the partition or just the
> > home directory was encrypted.
> > Also, I'm not sure where the boot record was.
> >
> > If possible, I will reinstall everything and then find those answers.
> > At, the speed this dd is going, I have some free time to do more research.
> > ...John
> >
> > On Sat, Feb 18, 2012 at 7:12 PM, Jim Lynch
> > <ale_nospam at fayettedigital.com> wrote:
> >> On 02/18/2012 05:19 PM, Derek Atkins wrote:
> >>> Once you make your copy, try making all your unallocated space into a
> >>> single linux partition.  Then you can dd the first few MB off into a file
> >>> (running a RAMDISK rescue environment, of course) and use 'file' to see if
> >>> you got it right.  Were you using LVM?  Then from there you might be able
> >>> to get lucky and find your partition endpoints.
> >> Since you can now with grub2 boot from LVM that might be the answer.
> >> I'm surprised that grub didn't recognize that.  I'd find a live cd or
> >> Knopix cd that understands LVM and see if the partition contains LVM
> >> volumes before I did anything rash.
> >>
> >> Jim.
> >> _______________________________________________
>
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