Fixing a broken GRUB

When upgrading my Mac OS X to Snow Leopard, OS X took the liberty of wiping out both my refit boot loader and may (chain) loader GRUB on the Linux partition. When booting Linux after the refit screen, I got a "Unknown file system" error.

The remedy was to boot with a Linux live CD (I used systemrescuecd), chroot into the Linux partition and run dpkg-reconfigure on the GRUB package:

First, I found the name of my Linux partition by running:

# fdisk -l /dev/sda

I found it to be/dev/sda4 and could proceed with the command line magic:

# mkdir /mnt/debian
# mount /dev/sda4 /mnt/debian
# mount -o bind /dev /mnt/debian/dev
# mount -o bind /sys /mnt/debian/sys
# mount -o bind /proc /mnt/debian/proc
# chroot /mnt/debian
# dpkg-reconfigure grub-pc

The crux was to rundpkg-reconfigure and select the Linux partition as the destination for GRUB. Funnily enough, it didn't suffice to just runupdate-grub as most people on the net speak of.

~ /home 🏠 ~ talks 💬 ~ bash ~ craftsmanship ~ db ~ dongxi ~ emacs ~ escenic ~ iam ~ java ~ js ~ language ~ latex ~ ldap ~ life ~ linux ~ llm ~ mac-os-x ~ mt-foo ~ network ~ norsk ~ python ~ quotes ~ running ~ security ~ travel ~ unix ~ various ~ vcs ~ webdesign ~ windows ~ discoveries ~ cv 🧙 ~
Licensed under CC BY Creative Commons License ~ 📡 RSS feed ~ ✉ torstein.k.johansen @ gmail ~ 🐘 @skybert@hachyderm.io ~ 🎥 youtube.com/@skybert