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I have a laptop ASUS, model G551J, with ubuntu 14.04.5 installed (64-bit architecture). After running on it a USB live of Lubuntu, 32-bit, the laptop won't boot any more. A grub-rescue prompt turns up with the following error:

error:file '/boot/grub/i386-pc/normal.mod' not found.

I ran a USB live of ubuntu 14.04.5, and executed boot-repair, but it threw an error, with this log:

http://paste.ubuntu.com/24279787/

There is a very similar question with a very good answer here:

error: file '/grub/i386-pc/normal.mod' not found

But this question is more about why boot-repair failed to repair this issue.

How can I fix this problem?

capstain
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1 Answers1

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It turned out that running the usb live of Lubuntu had left the normal.mod file in /boot/grub.bak/i386-pc/. Knowing this and with the help of the answers to this question I was able to boot from grub-rescue prompt. During this process I had to delete a line in /etc/fstab created by boot-repair which intended to load a boot/efi partition, as boot-repair had asked me to create a small partition for the EFI table. This line was interrupting the boot process with this message: 

The disk drive /boot/efi is not ready yet or not present

boot-repair had also uninstalled grub-pc and grub-pc-bin, and installed their counterparts grub-efi. This was making grub to look for an EFI table when the OS was configured to boot from BIOS. Reversing this situation fixed the problem, and after updating grub2now I can boot normally.

Bottom-line: don't use boot-repair.

Community
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capstain
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