Grub Loader Issue

[david1958]

For others reading along, the above mentioned pastebin link is here.

 http://pastebin.com/mSFVt7ze

david1958:

With that out of the way, extensive repairs were made, but some files were sent to lost+found as unrecoverable. They may be critical, or they may have been unsaved copies from memory that didn't get properly saved because of a bad shut down. If the latter, the OS itself may still be completely intact. First thing to do now is again try to mount the partition. If that now works, we can again try to view the contents of the files we were originally trying to access.

Start with the command;

[root@localhost ~]# mount /dev/sda7 /mnt/here                         <Enter>

If it again returns... mount: you must specify the filesystem type... try this command;

[root@localhost ~]# mount -t ext4 /dev/sda7 /mnt/here                  <Enter>

That assumes that you used the default ext4 filesystem. If you chose ext3 you'll get a "wrong fs type" error and will need to substitute ext3 when you re-run the command.

If the mount goes smoothly, with no errors, then continue with;

[root@localhost ~]# ls -l /mnt/here/boot/grub |grep menu.lst                            <Enter>

Again, if it is there, we then want to see what it contains.

[root@localhost ~]# cat /mnt/here/boot/grub/menu.lst                     <Enter>

...and the contents of its fstab;

[root@localhost ~]# cat /mnt/here/etc/fstab                          <Enter>

Post your results from the last two commands.

And again, if you get error messages anywhere along the way, stop what you are doing, and post the prompt, command and error message, exactly as you see them.

OP i am going to stop till you check  this. I ran the first commands like you told me to try and this is what I get. As for repair yesterday, yes I think on the one command it did do some repairs, but I could not send you that first list of commands for the program would not take it. Let me know what to do on this. I would rather check with you than congtinue. Let me know. I will check back at noon

Code: [Select]

[david@localhost ~]$ su root
Password:
[root@localhost ~]# mount /dev/sda7 /mnt/here
mount: /dev/sda7 already mounted or /mnt/here busy
mount: according to mtab, /dev/sda7 is already mounted on /mnt/here
[root@localhost ~]# mount -t ext4 /dev/sda7 /mnt/here
mount: /dev/sda7 already mounted or /mnt/here busy
mount: according to mtab, /dev/sda7 is already mounted on /mnt/here
[root@localhost ~]#


It says the mount was successful, and /dev/sda7 should now be accessible on /mnt/here. This is what we want. Now it's time to try the last three commands from the quoted text above. If the first reveals that there is a /boot/grub/menu.lst present, then you need to post the results of the last two commands.

OP, I ran the last 3 commands. I know you told me to stop if i got a error but I went ahead for it never found the directorys just to show you what it is doing

[root@localhost ~]# ls -l /mnt/here/boot/grub |grep menu.lst
ls: cannot access /mnt/here/boot/grub: No such file or directory
[root@localhost ~]# cat /mnt/here/boot/grub/menu.lst
cat: /mnt/here/boot/grub/menu.lst: No such file or directory
[root@localhost ~]# cat /mnt/here/etc/fstab
cat: /mnt/here/etc/fstab: No such file or directory
[root@localhost ~]#

Let me know what our next move is. I'm in the house for the rest of the night
david

[Old-Polack]

OP, I ran the last 3 commands. I know you told me to stop if i got a error but I went ahead for it never found the directorys just to show you what it is doing

[root@localhost ~]# ls -l /mnt/here/boot/grub |grep menu.lst
ls: cannot access /mnt/here/boot/grub: No such file or directory
[root@localhost ~]# cat /mnt/here/boot/grub/menu.lst
cat: /mnt/here/boot/grub/menu.lst: No such file or directory
[root@localhost ~]# cat /mnt/here/etc/fstab
cat: /mnt/here/etc/fstab: No such file or directory
[root@localhost ~]#

Let me know what our next move is. I'm in the house for the rest of the night
david

This is not looking good. It told us part of what we don't have, so let's see what we do have.

[root@localhost ~]# ls -l /mnt/here                          <Enter>

Post your results.

[david1958]

OP, I ran the last 3 commands. I know you told me to stop if i got a error but I went ahead for it never found the directorys just to show you what it is doing

[root@localhost ~]# ls -l /mnt/here/boot/grub |grep menu.lst
ls: cannot access /mnt/here/boot/grub: No such file or directory
[root@localhost ~]# cat /mnt/here/boot/grub/menu.lst
cat: /mnt/here/boot/grub/menu.lst: No such file or directory
[root@localhost ~]# cat /mnt/here/etc/fstab
cat: /mnt/here/etc/fstab: No such file or directory
[root@localhost ~]#

Let me know what our next move is. I'm in the house for the rest of the night
david

This is not looking good. It told us part of what we don't have, so let's see what we do have.

[root@localhost ~]# ls -l /mnt/here                          <Enter>

Post your results.

Here you go OP. I will await your decision. We have checked alot, You have been patient with me for I want to learn I hope you see that even by my boneheadeness sometimes.

[david@localhost ~]$ su root
Password:
[root@localhost ~]# ls -l /mnt/here
total 20
drwx------ 294 root root 20480 Apr 27 12:56 lost+found/
[root@localhost ~]#

[Old-Polack]

OP, I ran the last 3 commands. I know you told me to stop if i got a error but I went ahead for it never found the directorys just to show you what it is doing

[root@localhost ~]# ls -l /mnt/here/boot/grub |grep menu.lst
ls: cannot access /mnt/here/boot/grub: No such file or directory
[root@localhost ~]# cat /mnt/here/boot/grub/menu.lst
cat: /mnt/here/boot/grub/menu.lst: No such file or directory
[root@localhost ~]# cat /mnt/here/etc/fstab
cat: /mnt/here/etc/fstab: No such file or directory
[root@localhost ~]#

Let me know what our next move is. I'm in the house for the rest of the night
david

This is not looking good. It told us part of what we don't have, so let's see what we do have.

[root@localhost ~]# ls -l /mnt/here                          <Enter>

Post your results.

Here you go OP. I will await your decision. We have checked alot, You have been patient with me for I want to learn I hope you see that even by my boneheadeness sometimes.

[david@localhost ~]$ su root
Password:
[root@localhost ~]# ls -l /mnt/here
total 20
drwx------ 294 root root 20480 Apr 27 12:56 lost+found/
[root@localhost ~]#

What you have essentially, is an empty partition with whatever was recovered from the installation dumped into the lost+found directory

Two commands to try;

[root@localhost ~]# df |grep sda7                  <Enter>

...which should show the quantity of data present, and;

[root@localhost ~]# ls -l /mnt/here/lost+found                       <Enter>

...which will show what form it presently is in. I suspect none of it will be recoverable, but check anyway.

Post your results.

[david1958]

OP, I ran the last 3 commands. I know you told me to stop if i got a error but I went ahead for it never found the directorys just to show you what it is doing

[root@localhost ~]# ls -l /mnt/here/boot/grub |grep menu.lst
ls: cannot access /mnt/here/boot/grub: No such file or directory
[root@localhost ~]# cat /mnt/here/boot/grub/menu.lst
cat: /mnt/here/boot/grub/menu.lst: No such file or directory
[root@localhost ~]# cat /mnt/here/etc/fstab
cat: /mnt/here/etc/fstab: No such file or directory
[root@localhost ~]#

Let me know what our next move is. I'm in the house for the rest of the night
david

This is not looking good. It told us part of what we don't have, so let's see what we do have.

[root@localhost ~]# ls -l /mnt/here                          <Enter>

Post your results.

Here you go OP. I will await your decision. We have checked alot, You have been patient with me for I want to learn I hope you see that even by my boneheadeness sometimes.

[david@localhost ~]$ su root
Password:
[root@localhost ~]# ls -l /mnt/here
total 20
drwx------ 294 root root 20480 Apr 27 12:56 lost+found/
[root@localhost ~]#

What you have essentially, is an empty partition with whatever was recovered from the installation dumped into the lost+found directory

Two commands to try;

[root@localhost ~]# df |grep sda7                  <Enter>

...which should show the quantity of data present, and;

[root@localhost ~]# ls -l /mnt/here/lost+found                       <Enter>

...which will show what form it presently is in. I suspect none of it will be recoverable, but check anyway.

Post your results.

OP here is the first command results

[david@localhost ~]$ su root
Password:
[root@localhost ~]# df |grep sda7
/dev/sda7              99G   13G   81G  14% /media/disk-5
/dev/sda7              99G   13G   81G  14% /mnt/here

As for the second command, It will not go over here so I posted on the other link http://pastebin.com/fwMiCm47

[Old-Polack]

david1958:

How can I say this without stating the brutal truth. You are now the proud owner of one partition containing 13 GB of pure trash. That is not what either of us wanted to see.

This is the point where you reformat the partition and reinstall.

I noticed the partition was also mounted as /media/disk-5 so your /dev/sda9 is probably mounted somewhere in /media also. I'm assuming that would be your /home partition for the destroyed installation. You might want to check that to see if everything there is still intact. You should be able to do that with Dolphin if the same UID was used for the normal user on both installations. If everything on that partition is intact, reinstalling shouldn't harm anything there as long as you don't check that partition for reformatting, and choose /dev/sda7 as the / partition.

One other thing, you can't put a link in between code tags, and have it still work, so I removed them (the code tags) from your last post.

[marcin82]

If I see properly - my post was removed. Why?

[Just17]

For others reading along, the above mentioned pastebin link is here.

 http://pastebin.com/mSFVt7ze

david1958:

With that out of the way, extensive repairs were made, but some files were sent to lost+found as unrecoverable. They may be critical, or they may have been unsaved copies from memory that didn't get properly saved because of a bad shut down. If the latter, the OS itself may still be completely intact. First thing to do now is again try to mount the partition. If that now works, we can again try to view the contents of the files we were originally trying to access.

Start with the command;

[root@localhost ~]# mount /dev/sda7 /mnt/here                         <Enter>

If it again returns... mount: you must specify the filesystem type... try this command;

[root@localhost ~]# mount -t ext4 /dev/sda7 /mnt/here                  <Enter>

That assumes that you used the default ext4 filesystem. If you chose ext3 you'll get a "wrong fs type" error and will need to substitute ext3 when you re-run the command.

If the mount goes smoothly, with no errors, then continue with;

[root@localhost ~]# ls -l /mnt/here/boot/grub |grep menu.lst                            <Enter>

Again, if it is there, we then want to see what it contains.

[root@localhost ~]# cat /mnt/here/boot/grub/menu.lst                     <Enter>

...and the contents of its fstab;

[root@localhost ~]# cat /mnt/here/etc/fstab                         <Enter>

Post your results from the last two commands.

And again, if you get error messages anywhere along the way, stop what you are doing, and post the prompt, command and error message, exactly as you see them.

OP i am going to stop till you check  this. I ran the first commands like you told me to try and this is what I get. As for repair yesterday, yes I think on the one command it did do some repairs, but I could not send you that first list of commands for the program would not take it. Let me know what to do on this. I would rather check with you than congtinue. Let me know. I will check back at noon

Code: [Select]

[david@localhost ~]$ su root
Password:
[root@localhost ~]# mount /dev/sda7 /mnt/here
mount: /dev/sda7 already mounted or /mnt/here busy
mount: according to mtab, /dev/sda7 is already mounted on /mnt/here
[root@localhost ~]# mount -t ext4 /dev/sda7 /mnt/here
mount: /dev/sda7 already mounted or /mnt/here busy
mount: according to mtab, /dev/sda7 is already mounted on /mnt/here
[root@localhost ~]#


It says the mount was successful, and /dev/sda7 should now be accessible on /mnt/here. This is what we want. Now it's time to try the last three commands from the quoted text above. If the first reveals that there is a /boot/grub/menu.lst present, then you need to post the results of the last two commands.

Code: [Select]

[david@localhost ~]$ su root
Password:
[root@localhost ~]# mount /dev/sda7 /mnt/here
mount: /dev/sda7 already mounted or /mnt/here busy
mount: according to mtab, /dev/sda7 is already mounted on /mnt/here

Does this not say that the partition was previously mounted and remains so?

When such a situation is met .....  partitions mounted that were not expected to be so, would it not be prudent to unmount everything first, and then starting from a known point, mount what is needed for the work to be done?

[david1958]

If I see properly - my post was removed. Why?

I cant give you a answer why your post was removed. Just to clear the air but tks for your help also
david1958

[Old-Polack]

If I see properly - my post was removed. Why?

Two things:

1. You posted information about grub that was from a debian site in Polish, and the same information is already available on this forum in English.

2. More to the point, it was irrelevant to the problem at hand, and had no proper context within this thread.

[david1958]

david1958:

How can I say this without stating the brutal truth. You are now the proud owner of one partition containing 13 GB of pure trash. That is not what either of us wanted to see.

This is the point where you reformat the partition and reinstall.

I noticed the partition was also mounted as /media/disk-5 so your /dev/sda9 is probably mounted somewhere in /media also. I'm assuming that would be your /home partition for the destroyed installation. You might want to check that to see if everything there is still intact. You should be able to do that with Dolphin if the same UID was used for the normal user on both installations. If everything on that partition is intact, reinstalling shouldn't harm anything there as long as you don't check that partition for reformatting, and choose /dev/sda7 as the / partition.

One other thing, you can't put a link in between code tags, and have it still work, so I removed them (the code tags) from your last post.

OP, well we gave it a great try didn't we. All of us that was involved. I do thank you all for the help on my issue. I would just like to know what caused all of this though. Everything was working good until a week ago saturday night and thats when the kaffiene tv viewer would not x out. I could stop it but it would not clear no matter what I did, Reboot twice and then the grub issue.Even when I removed Kaffiene completely and reinstalled it it still did the same thing on the x ing out the program. Any way Op and the REst. You taught me some commands and it made my learning experiene a little better. I will be looking forward to being active in the forum for I want to do nothing but learn more on pc linux and the linux system. It fasinates me.
David

[Old-Polack]

david1958:

You've got a good attitude, and that's half the battle. For what it's worth, I know what I know, for the most part, because I broke more systems than anyone else I know, then had to figure out how fix them 

[david1958]

david1958:

You've got a good attitude, and that's half the battle. For what it's worth, I know what I know, for the most part, because I broke more systems than anyone else I know, then had to figure out how fix them  

tks OP for the good attitude, I was afraid I was getting under ur skin a little but as we went on I believe that was no more than a hunch. I am going to reload Monty on that hd with the issue this evining. I had to reload one for a buddy like this one and I just reformated the / ,  I Left the swap and home the same and it did just rewright the / and never removed any of my stored file on there. Hopefully it will do just that this time. And it did not hurt the duel boot either. Do have 1 question though, I have loaded probably 15 systems for friends with this and I have always done it as / then swap and then home. I was reading somewhere yesterday in some of the other post that someone suggested do it as swap and then / and then the home now is there any advantage to that or not. Let me know. I am not going to boot into the hd with the issue until you respond. I got done early on milking tonite.
David

[Old-Polack]

david1958:

You've got a good attitude, and that's half the battle. For what it's worth, I know what I know, for the most part, because I broke more systems than anyone else I know, then had to figure out how fix them  

tks OP for the good attitude, I was afraid I was getting under ur skin a little but as we went on I believe that was no more than a hunch. I am going to reload Monty on that hd with the issue this evining. I had to reload one for a buddy like this one and I just reformated the / ,  I Left the swap and home the same and it did just rewright the / and never removed any of my stored file on there. Hopefully it will do just that this time. And it did not hurt the duel boot either. Do have 1 question though, I have loaded probably 15 systems for friends with this and I have always done it as / then swap and then home. I was reading somewhere yesterday in some of the other post that someone suggested do it as swap and then / and then the home now is there any advantage to that or not. Let me know. I am not going to boot into the hd with the issue until you respond. I got done early on milking tonite.
David

I don't think it really makes a difference. Starting with a fresh hard drive that will be Linux only, I know I will have more than one OS on the drive, so I start with a boot partition, followed by a swap partition, followed by a / partition for the first installed system, followed by the extended partition that covers the remainder of the hard drive. This uses up all the available primary partitions, so any new partitions will automatically be logical partitions from then on. I don't use a separate /home partition, but have numerous data partitions that I mount in specific places dictated by my /etc/fstab file, and I copy the same fstab file to each new installation, then edit the / partition entry to reflect the correct location for each specific installation.

With this method, every data partition mounts in the same relative position on each installation, so I always know where to locate each specific type of data, without having to worry about which installation I'm currently using.

Partitioning schemes are pretty much an individual choice item. I've been using the same basic scheme for 13 years; as long as I've been using Linux as my only OS. I used to have a separate /home partition for each installation, but switched to the multiple data partition with /home being just a directory on each / partition method because, for me, it was a more efficient use of the total hard drive space.

[david1958]

david1958:

You've got a good attitude, and that's half the battle. For what it's worth, I know what I know, for the most part, because I broke more systems than anyone else I know, then had to figure out how fix them  

tks OP for the good attitude, I was afraid I was getting under ur skin a little but as we went on I believe that was no more than a hunch. I am going to reload Monty on that hd with the issue this evining. I had to reload one for a buddy like this one and I just reformated the / ,  I Left the swap and home the same and it did just rewright the / and never removed any of my stored file on there. Hopefully it will do just that this time. And it did not hurt the duel boot either. Do have 1 question though, I have loaded probably 15 systems for friends with this and I have always done it as / then swap and then home. I was reading somewhere yesterday in some of the other post that someone suggested do it as swap and then / and then the home now is there any advantage to that or not. Let me know. I am not going to boot into the hd with the issue until you respond. I got done early on milking tonite.
David

I don't think it really makes a difference. Starting with a fresh hard drive that will be Linux only, I know I will have more than one OS on the drive, so I start with a boot partition, followed by a swap partition, followed by a / partition for the first installed system, followed by the extended partition that covers the remainder of the hard drive. This uses up all the available primary partitions, so any new partitions will automatically be logical partitions from then on. I don't use a separate /home partition, but have numerous data partitions that I mount in specific places dictated by my /etc/fstab file, and I copy the same fstab file to each new installation, then edit the / partition entry to reflect the correct location for each specific installation.

With this method, every data partition mounts in the same relative position on each installation, so I always know where to locate each specific type of data, without having to worry about which installation I'm currently using.

Partitioning schemes are pretty much an individual choice item. I've been using the same basic scheme for 13 years; as long as I've been using Linux as my only OS. I used to have a separate /home partition for each installation, but switched to the multiple data partition with /home being just a directory on each / partition method because, for me, it was a more efficient use of the total hard drive space.

OP I could do that on the hd with the issue. Curious, on the boot partition what should be a proper size for it. I got a 500 gig . I dont need windows at all on that one. I just did it for pratice on duel bootBut I do under what else you are getting at now on the mutiple data partitions. Keep certain things in the proper spots and does not work your drive so hard.