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My previous setup had Windows and Ubuntu in two primary partitions on the same HDD. I had backed up the Ubuntu and EFI partitions (using Macrium Reflect) before giving to service center, where they fully wiped the disk. I have created new partitions and installed Windows. I have now restored the Ubuntu image to new partition, but I need to set up a boot entry for this.

There are 2 problems:

  1. I need to create a boot entry for this Ubuntu as I cannot use the previous EFI backup since the partition layout is different from time of backup. How can I proceed?

  2. The restore of the partition done by Macrium is showing as RAW volume and Recovery partition in diskpart:

Volume 9 RAW Partition 16 GB Healthy Hidden

Partition 10 Recovery 16 GB 902 GB

I ran Testdisk and it was able to list files in the partition. I was able to save a copy as a dd image. I have read many forum threads but apparently they have talked about restoring a full HDD restore and some had problem booting linux from that too. I havent got any leads since days.

How can I properly get the ubuntu to boot? Any help is greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance.

Pablo Escobaro
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    Your best and easiest path will be now to reinstall Ubuntu afresh from an installation medium. That will take you 30 minutes. Then you will need more time to reconfigure your personal preferences and place your user data back. – vanadium Jul 15 '21 at 07:21

1 Answers1

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I have been able to boot it properly. Hence, I am posting below, the steps for future users. The restored partition showing up as RAW volume and Recovery partition under Windows was to be omitted. I guess, it's because Windows cannot recognize ext4 format. Macrium backup and restore had worked perfectly fine in this case.

Backup and restore of single partitions are possible. There is no need to have the full disk backed up. Nor reinstalling is necessary. Saves time and effort. If you want to save further space, or have to clone it to a smaller disk/partition, you will have to shrink the linux partition as much as possible before imaging for backup as Macrium images the whole partition bitwise (not the case for Windows).

Solution

The easiest method was to create a bootable live USB/disk of the same OS I had. In my case, I had restored the xubuntu/budgie partition image. I created a live disk of Ubuntu, and booted into it using "Try Ubuntu without installing" entry.

Gparted was able to recognize the restored partition as ext4. Now, the only issue was creating a boot menu entry for it. For that, I followed the steps mentioned in this post How can I reinstall GRUB to the EFI partition as answered by cl-netbox.

Grub will recognize and add Windows, hence dual booting was sorted.

Pablo Escobaro
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