[ale] grub rescue

Wed Feb 22 14:34:55 EST 2012

I can present on it again at some point, if desired.

I actually know of one other group of people that would be interested in
the video of it as well... there was a thread on gentoo-user about grub vs.
grub2 recently there.

--
Sent from my Ice Cream Sandwich-powered HTC G2
Please excuse any typos.
On Feb 22, 2012 11:02 AM, "Rich Faulkner" <rfaulkner at tux86.org> wrote:

> **
> When I returned to Linux I tried dual booting 9.10 w/X64 but GRUB2 soon
> got the better of me.  I've never really gotten the hang of it (but haven't
> spent that much time with it either).  Having several HDD in that former
> system; I left X64 on one disk (and a borked GRUB2) and installed Fedora 12
> on a separate HDD w/GRUB (something I was more comfortable with).  Thus I
> got my Fedora installation running on a separate (physical) disk and GRUB
> chain-loading X64 from the Windows disk.  Then I set the BIOS to boot the
> GRUB disk and thus I washed my hands of it and rarely booted into XP.  (My
> noob approach to a workaround until such a time that I built a new
> machine).
>
> New machine has now been in service for a long while and I'm running ONLY
> 11.04 on it and am quite happy.  I do run a Virtualbox VM of XP for some
> work that I do for a museum in Colorado in CorelDraw 10; but that's about
> how far I am willing to let Windows run on my machines anymore.
> Unfortunately, our studio requires baremetal installs of Windows for
> hardware support to our specialized broadcast audio cards.  Digigram
> doesn't have Linux drivers for their PCX924 cards thus we're stuck with
> "Bill".  We at least keep them offline and do all online work with Ubuntu
> boxes.
>
> Do we have any good GRUB2 pros in the group?  Could be a good topic for
> some of us at a monthly meeting.  Just a thought.....
>
> Rich in Lilburn
>
>
> On Tue, 2012-02-21 at 22:48 -0500, Michael Campbell wrote:
>
> 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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