Troubleshooting Ubuntu GRUB issues

I rebooted, and selected the entry for Ubuntu from Windows boot loader. I was greeted with GRUB menu. There was only one entry for Ubuntu which was for memtest option.

My previous post (nearly) ended as above. In that post, I mentioned that I was able to overcome the problem, read all the details in this post.

Before we begin let me make it clear, that most likely the problem I faced was due to custom DVD created by LFY folks, and (possibly) not due to Ubuntu installer. (But I can’t be certain)

So I couldn’t really boot into Ubuntu, since the only option was memtest. Initially I thought installer is being smart, and wants me to run the memtest first, and then it will automatically boot into Ubuntu (and also fix GRUB, now that I have successfully run the memtest) But that wasn’t the case. I did give it a shot, but memtest was slow.  After 48 minutes, and only 72% done, I gave up. I agree my machine is old, but it is not that old.  And LiveCD worked fine (acceptable speed/performance)

So I turned to fine folks at Pune Linux User Group aka PLUG. Most people suggested that this is likely because I installed GRUB on root partition, as opposed to MBR. That did not make sense to me, since I did get the GRUB menu, so location of GRUB wasn’t an issue.

Abhishek provided the details of how I could manually boot into Ubuntu, even if the GRUB menu was incomplete. He also had suggestions about how to then fix the menu.lst file, once I was able to boot into Ubuntu, manually. (I must say that GRUB is probably better than LILIO in the sense, that it provides a very basic interactive shell, which helps user boot manually by providing various parameters. I am not aware if LILO provides any such facility)

This is when I realized that two important files (vmlinuz and initrd) required for Ubuntu (or any Linux, for that matter) to boot were missing !!!!! Not only that, I didn’t find them at expected location even in LiveCD.  I was expecting these to be available under /boot on LiveCD. Back to PLUG mailing list, and this time we figured that these files were present in /cdrom/capser.  (Another Thanks to Abhishek).

Things were relatively simple after that. I copied both these file from LiveCD into /boot.

Reboot, Crossed-my-fingers, and tried instructions to manually boot into Ubuntu … Voila !!! I was looking at Ubuntu Desktop.

Then I updated the menu.lst, and retried. But it didn’t work, again manual boot. In all the excitement, I had done some typo. Fixed that and now I can successfully boot into Windows XP as well as Ubuntu 8.10 (From Windows Boot loader)

Big Thanks to Abhishek Amberkar, and entire PLUG gang !!!

Note: In case you are interested in blow-by-blow description refer to the discussion at plug list.