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After trying to upgrade to Windows 10 from Windows 7, I have lost the Grub interface to my Ubuntu Partition. This is my first problem :(

As explained here the boot-repair utility could give me a chance to recover my partition, so I tried to boot from an Ubuntu 15.10 live DVD.

And now comes my second problem : the DVD wont boot, I get a never-ending "out of memory: kill process" message :(

I'm completely stuck, any hint would be greatly appreciated.

For information:

  • my system boot is a non-EFI classical BIOS
  • my current DVD is a functional one since I have already installed Ubuntu 15.10 with it.
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candide
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  • you might not have enough ram, try using the mini.iso instead https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Installation/MinimalCD – mchid Nov 14 '15 at 22:31
  • Thanks for the suggestion but RAM is not a problem here: I have 2Go and some days ago my machine managed to install ubuntu 15.10. This was before upgrading to windows 10. My problem is exactly the same as: Windows 10 upgrade, now no partition will boot – candide Nov 20 '15 at 14:33
  • http://howtoubuntu.org/how-to-repair-restore-reinstall-grub-2-with-a-ubuntu-live-cd – mchid Nov 22 '15 at 20:36
  • use a usb instead of the disk, if the disk has any scratches, it might not boot. also, it should go without saying that you need to disable fastboot from windows 10 options. – mchid Nov 22 '15 at 20:36
  • This sounds like what I have, I recently did the Windows 10 November update (yesterday it got a chance to finish the restart process). Now nothing will boot. Not linux, not the linux recovery CD, Windows, Windows install CD. Linux states it is out of memory and has nothing to kill. BIOS sees all 8GB. – he_the_great Jan 15 '16 at 22:47

1 Answers1

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I was able to solve this problem in my personal situation, which appears to have been a corrupt partition table. Windows is still not bootable at this time.

The first step was to remove the hard drive from the computer.

Next up was to make the hard drive an external hard drive. I had a SATA to external USB case. Attaching the drive to the computer would eventually result in a system freeze/crash.

The trick is to boot into a live CD or other Linux partition. When the drive is attached launch GParted or other tool used for writing partitions.

Create a new partition on the attached drive, you'll be warned that all data will be lost (perfect since it already has been).

TestDisk should be run and used for recreating the old partition table. Note that you may be able to do this directly if you're fast enough.

Grub (boot loader) will need to be reinstalled onto the drive. It may be appropriate to do I recovery of Windows first then install grub so that Windows can be found.

None of these steps should make data recovery worse than it already is. Just don't add steps in there to create new partitions.

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he_the_great
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