getting grub working right again

[dhdurgee]

I had some fun getting grub to work properly with maya on one of my systems, but once I got it working it was fine...until earlier today.

Earlier today I hit a freeze that appears to have been a cinnamon crash of some sort. I ultimately wound up restarting the system, when to my surprise I found myself at the sh:grub> prompt instead of booted to maya! The top line identifes this as "GNU GRUB version 1.97~beta4" and set shows some environment variables set, so it appears to have gone partway through my grub.cfg file. After looking a few things up, I finally tried to use the configfile command with the following results:

sh:grub> configfile /boot/grub/grub.cfg
<screen cleared>
error: Invalid mode: auto
<blank line>
Syntax error
Incorrect command
sh:grub>

looking at my grub.cfg shows "auto" only one place:

set gfxmode=auto

Some searching shows that this is the default, so I edited grub.cfg to remark this line out with the following results:

sh:grub> configfile /boot/grub/grub.cfg
error: No suitable mode found.
syntax error
Incorrect command
sh:grub>

I have also tried replacing "auto" with some specific modes, but I still get the "No suitable mode found." message

This is of course annoying, but I can boot maya manually by specifying:

sh:grub>linux /boot/vmlinux.... root=/dev/sda14 ro
sh:grub>initrd /boot/init....
sh:grub>boot

Any suggestions what I need to do to get my menu back? Any idea why it disappeared? Any further diagnostics I can run?

If it were another system I would likely simply try to regenerate/reinstall grub, but given all the "fun" I had getting grub to work here at all I would prefer another approach.

Dave

[cwsnyder]

I would recommend using your Live CD/DVD to do a grub-install to your hard drive.

[usbtux]

Boot and run from Live DVD
open a terminal, type these commands

1. sudo os-prober

see a list of OSes first.

here is a possible output:

mint@mint ~ $ sudo os-prober
/dev/sda1:Windows 7 (loader):Windows:chain
/dev/sdb1:Linux Mint 13 Maya (13):LinuxMint:linux
/dev/sdd1:Linux Mint Debian Edition (1):LinuxMint1:linux



2.

sudo mount /dev/sdb1 /mnt

3.

sudo grub-install --root-directory=/mnt /dev/sda


Where sda is the harddisk used to boot