LM and recovery mode missing from GRUB, grub-install fails

[ohcrapgorillas]

TO ANYONE WITH THE SAME PROBLEM who stumbles upon this thread: the problem was not solved. I re-installed and was bitter about it. Sorry.

Alright so it seems I have more of a problem than I originally thought. The short of it: I thought I had accidentally changed the default GRUB boot option, but now that I've seen the menu, both LM11 and recovery mode options are gone. Yikes!

Note: Running an AMD64 with only Linux Mint 11 installed with default partition scheme.

ORIGINAL POST:This is kind of a funny situation I've put myself in--at least, I'm laughing about it. The other day I was playing around in the Control Center and merely looked at the drop-down menu of boot options. I think when I clicked away, it changed the default to memtest64 because now, my system only ever boots into memtest64! Right now I'm running from a live USB stick, since there's no boot menu that appears by default.

If there's a button I can press at some point during boot to get to the GRUB menu, that'd be awesome. If not, I'm not really comfortable editing GRUB by myself since I'm pretty new to Linux. This is a default LM11 install (AMD 64), so the config files haven't been altered (other than, obviously, booting by default into memtest64); still, if you want me to post any files I'll be happy to.

And I promise that once the system is capable of booting into LM11 again, I'll add a boot menu

[wyrdoak]

if grub is already installed after boot and the BIO's loading hold down the "shift" key should show grub the select the OS from the list.
To change grub,go to menu/ administration/startup manager /default-operating system in the boot options tab scroll to the OS you wish to default too. then Close it should then see up you boot correctly.

Grub install

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3.3 Installing GRUB using grub-install

Caution: This procedure is definitely less safe, because there are several ways in which your computer can become unbootable. For example, most operating systems don't tell GRUB how to map BIOS drives to OS devices correctly--GRUB merely guesses the mapping. This will succeed in most cases, but not always. Therefore, GRUB provides you with a map file called the device map, which you must fix if it is wrong. See section 15.3 The map between BIOS drives and OS devices, for more details.

If you still do want to install GRUB under a UNIX-like OS (such as GNU), invoke the program grub-install (see section 16. Invoking grub-install) as the superuser (root).

The usage is basically very simple. You only need to specify one argument to the program, namely, where to install the boot loader. The argument can be either a device file (like `/dev/hda') or a partition specified in GRUB's notation. For example, under Linux the following will install GRUB into the MBR of the first IDE disk:

 	
# grub-install /dev/hda
Likewise, under GNU/Hurd, this has the same effect:

 	
# grub-install /dev/hd0
If it is the first BIOS drive, this is the same as well:

 	
# grub-install '(hd0)'
Or you can omit the parentheses:

 	
# grub-install hd0
But all the above examples assume that GRUB should use images under the root directory. If you want GRUB to use images under a directory other than the root directory, you need to specify the option `--root-directory'. The typical usage is that you create a GRUB boot floppy with a filesystem. Here is an example:

 	
# mke2fs /dev/fd0
# mount -t ext2 /dev/fd0 /mnt
# grub-install --root-directory=/mnt fd0
# umount /mnt
Another example is when you have a separate boot partition which is mounted at `/boot'. Since GRUB is a boot loader, it doesn't know anything about mountpoints at all. Thus, you need to run grub-install like this:

 	
# grub-install --root-directory=/boot /dev/hda
By the way, as noted above, it is quite difficult to guess BIOS drives correctly under a UNIX-like OS. Thus, grub-install will prompt you to check if it could really guess the correct mappings, after the installation. The format is defined in 15.3 The map between BIOS drives and OS devices. Please be quite careful. If the output is wrong, it is unlikely that your computer will be able to boot with no problem.

Note that grub-install is actually just a shell script and the real task is done by the grub shell grub (see section 15. Invoking the grub shell). Therefore, you may run grub directly to install GRUB, without using grub-install. Don't do that, however, unless you are very familiar with the internals of GRUB. Installing a boot loader on a running OS may be extremely dangerous.

[ohcrapgorillas]

Sorry for the last post--misread what you wrote. I'm going to reboot now and hold the shift key down. If it works I'll be back to mark this as solved. Thanks for the help and I hope we've learned something here today--there ARE such things as stupid questions, after all.

OK--new problem. It appears that Linux Mint and Recovery mode are both GONE from GRUB altogether. I'll edit the main post and title to reflect the new problem. Yikes.

[tdockery97]

Have you tried reinstalling Grub using the live CD/DVD? Instructions are here: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Grub2. Go to item #12 and then follow steps 4 & 5.

[ohcrapgorillas]

Using GParted to look at the boot partition yields this lovely message:
Unable to detect file system! Possible reasons are:
-The file system is damaged
-The file system is unknown to GParted
-There is no file system available
-the device entry /dev/sda1 is missing

I formatted the boot partition to ext4 and tried to reinstall GRUB from a linux live DVD (since my live USB stick forgot was 'sudo' was, apparently--just one of the other 1000 problems I have had today NOT included in this post) and here is what I get:

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mint@mint ~ $ sudo mount /dev/sda1 /mnt
mint@mint ~ $ sudo grub-install --boot-directory=/mnt/boot /dev/sda
grub-probe: error: cannot stat 'aufs'
cp: writing `mnt/boot/grub/normal.mod': No space left on device
mint@mint ~ $ sudo grub-install --root-directory=/mnt /dev/sda
grub-probe: error: cannot stat 'aufs'
cp: writing `mnt/boot/grub/normal.mod': No space left on device

Someone please help.