Score:1

Rescue help needed - Linux box no longer boots Ubuntu 20.04 and finds and old Linux Mint 17.2 (after recent updates)

ru flag

I went out of town for a long weekend, shutting down the Linux box as a precaution for potential thunderstorms.

When I returned, my Linux box seems to have lost track of it's grub references to Ubuntu 20.04on /dev/sda1 (my current version). The drive also has a Linux Mint 17.02 on the /dev/sda7 partition, and an Ubuntu 18.04 partition. System has two SATA drives, a 1T seagate ST1000 and a 4T Toshiba. The drives appear to be fine, and show up normally.

The system now will only boot into the Mint 17.02 or Ubuntu 18.04 OSes.

My suspicion is some items that were pending a restart tweaked the grub config and somehow clobbered the references to the boot & root partitions for Ubuntu 20.04

Is there a good guide to recovering the system and restoring the missing boot/root partition?

I built a USB stick with Ubuntu 22.04, and can boot into a rescue mode, but need pointers to specific instructions for forcing grub on the /boot or UEFI partition to update.

sudodus avatar
jp flag
The first thing to try is (when booted into the 'main system' which the computer boots into by default) to run `sudo update-grub` and reboot. Then it *should* have your Ubuntu 20.04 LTS in the grub menu again.
guiverc avatar
cn flag
I would check for *damage* to the system, be it hardware or metadata on the drive itself caused by power surge during storm etc. I'd boot a *live* system and perform checks on drives (ie. hardware health using SMART) and if all okay, then check metadata using file-system check utilities. If any issues in the latter are found, I'd expect normal operation after that (*unless you've made changes in attempts to correct issue with unfixed issue*). You've provided few details of 20.04 (server? desktop? architecture? how often upgraded etc) so we can't offer much there but you can explore it yourself
The Programmer avatar
ru flag
Running Ubuntu 20.04 LTS on a beefy desktop (Gigabyte GA-Z97X-SOC Force) with two NVidia GPUs from EVGA. (750 Ti and 1050 Ti) The partition table seems fine, I ran fsck and will run the hardware health checks to verify the driver surfaces are OK. Linux Mint no longer has accurate configuration, so X won't start with the NVidia graphics cards I have.
The Programmer avatar
ru flag
Apparently the EFI system partition got clobbered, so I have to re-create that for update-grub to have something to work on. No obvious disk failure modes exist.
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