[eobard]

I'm too furious to go into details right now. Here's where I am. DSL destroyed my menu.lst and backup so nothing boots now. How do I fix this!?!?!? I probably could dope it out but I'm looking for a fast solution. I'm too busy concentrating on not going berserk to think right now so if someone could just spoon feed me an answer I won't wind up doing time in a mental health facility and you will have my gratitude.

thank you.

[Misfit138]

Boot into a live cd, mount your drive and create a new /boot/grub/menu.lst.

You can use the one from the live cd as a guide.

So say your hard drive with the broken grub is sda1. Just do

mkdir /mnt/disk
mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/disk

cd /mnt/disk/boot/grub

and then

nano menu.lst

EDIT heres a loose guide as to what to put in there:

timeout 5
default 0
# TIP: If you want a 1024x768 framebuffer, add "vga=773" to your kernel line.
# (0) Linux on sata a
title Linux
root (hd0,0)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz26 root=/devsda1 ro vga=773
initrd /boot/kernel26.img

[aaa]

If you still get this:

grub>

Then you can enter what was in the menu.lst by hand to boot stuff. With a 'boot' command to run what you just typed.

[MRD]

We can write one for you easily enough if you provide us with the details of your partitioning scheme (which os's on which partition, names of kernels, etc.) I don't know any easier fix.

[eobard]

I've calmed down, and am a little bit less insane at this point. I'm closer to my happy place now so I'll plug away at it myself for a bit before I ask for more help.

[splat]

i'm not 100% sure, but the DSL cd might have a menu.lst on it (that it copies over when you do a hdd install), so you might be able to simply copy that over. at any rate, as was stated above, if you get to teh grub prompt, you can insert the commands manually to get in to the system, then recreate your menu.lst.

[MRD]

This is why you should never, ever let automatic installers mess with your boot loader. Always set it up yourself. Just learn how to use grub and write your own grub files, and each time you add a new os, just add a new entry for it in your grub.conf file.

[Captain Newbie]

Originally Posted by MRD

This is why you should never, ever let automatic installers mess with your boot loader. Always set it up yourself. Just learn how to use grub and write your own grub files, and each time you add a new os, just add a new entry for it in your grub.conf file.

Oh, we Gentoo users have it so good—no automation messing with our stuff

[eobard]

Well, thanks to my own little bit of knowledge on Linux, Google, and a whole lot of patience, skill and assistance from MRD, I am now posting from Ubuntu again!! And that DSL CD is going to meet with a little accident in the next day or two......

Much public thanks to MRD!

[Captain Newbie]

Originally Posted by eobard

Well, thanks to my own little bit of knowledge on Linux, Google, and a whole lot of patience, skill and assistance from MRD, I am now posting from Ubuntu again!! And that DSL CD is going to meet with a little accident in the next day or two......

Much public thanks to MRD!

Out of curiosity, does Ubuntu by default set you up with a separate /boot partition? And does it mark this partition as automount?

[MRD]

Multiboot is something best handled manually. Trust any system to set it all up automagically and never break anything and you are asking for trouble. Learn Grub. Love Grub. Grub is your friend.

[eobard]

Originally Posted by Captain Newbie

Out of curiosity, does Ubuntu by default set you up with a separate /boot partition? And does it mark this partition as automount?

Well mine isn't on a seperate partition, and I don't remember altering the default configuration when I installed it, which was a while ago, but I'm going to speculatively presume that it does not default to a seperate partition for /boot.