0

I was getting this particular error while booting up:

enter image description here

I was trying this solution provided here, but I don't know where does Ubuntu reside in the disk.

Community
  • 1
Shadow_Sphynx
  • 1

1 Answers1

2

I've been using Linux for more than 15 years and I dread having to type commands in grub. The grub CLI is a difficult challenge. Documentation does not keep up, changes in types of hard disk partitions and the types of boot systems (UEFI, BIOS) and partition table types (MBR, GPT) make this confusing. You can learn a lot by fighting through grub2 in the CLI, but it is a chore.

I think the most dependable fix is to run the Ubuntu installer again and let the system get it right for you. I had this problem after installing Ubuntu 16.04 because I tried to get an encrypted partition and it just did not work the first time. Running the re-install fixed it like magic. When you start the install, be careful to choose the custom partition option and tell it to use the same disk partitions that you have now, it is much more likely come out with a working system. Don't reformat your "/home" partition, but anything else can be reformatted.

The only problem, then, is to be sure what is in your current partitions so that you know how to name them in the installer setup.

You can save yourself some heartache if you use the bootable USB Ubuntu image to start a live session and take a look at your hard disk. You can make sure what the partitions are, and you can mount them and see that the files are actually there. Of course, the vital ones you are looking to re-use are "/" (the root partition), "/boot" (if you have a separate boot partition, need to name it) and "/home". If your previous install did not have a separate "/boot", it is not fatal these days, but I still like to set up that way. You may also see separate partitions for "/tmp", "/var", "/usr/local" and whatnot, depending on what mood you were in when you installed that.

If you do keep trying to interact with grub, good luck. You will learn doing that. If you need to ask for more help, we need more information about your partition table. Get that info in the live session. I was going to say that the output of "/sbin/fdisk /dev/sda" followed by "p" would help, but that won't help if you have a new SSD and a GPT disk partition. It appears to me the program "parted" is most likely to run and will show the broadest set of partition types. If you run 

sudo parted

then run

print all

Then show the whole thing.

pauljohn32
  • 3,743