HELP!! I deleted an old partition and now I can't boot!

[Cliff76]

I was doing some housekeeping on my system cleaning up an old clone of my current working partition for Kubuntu and forgot that Grub was using it to boot. Now my system won't boot at all! Fortunately I had a copy of the latest Mepis 6.5-rc2 disk available so I've sinced installed it and I'm running from a secondary partition. I want to be able to boot back into Kubuntu though so that I can get some work done. I've been struggling all day. Help!

Here's the details of what actually happened. I had the following setup on my Dell's SATA drive:
MBR - Grub booting all three OSes
/dev/sda1 - Windows XP
/dev/sda2 - Kubuntu
/dev/sda3 - Extended
/dev/sda4 - Linux Swap -logical
/dev/sda5 - Mepis 3.4.x -logical

Using GParted on another live disk I deleted the windows partition (since I've been running it ok in VMWare) and cloned Kubuntu to the 1st partition because I wanted to eventually extend my extended partition so I ended up with this:
MBR - Grub booting all three OSes
/dev/sda1 - Kubuntu -clone
/dev/sda2 - Kubuntu
/dev/sda3 - Extended
/dev/sda4 - Linux Swap -logical
/dev/sda5 - Mepis 3.4.x -logical
It took a while to get that far and I corrupted my Kubuntu partition in the process causing me to rebuild it's index or whatever. I left it like that for a few months not having the time to go back and finish. This morning I figured I'd try to finish where I left off. I thought that since I'd been sucessfully running from sda1 I could clear the rest of the disk (all partitions except for primary sda1) since I no longer use it anymore. I forgot that Grub was still loading from sda2 so when I rebooted I got Grub error 17. I booted from my Mepis disk thinking that since it was based on Kubuntu anyway that I could just reinstall Grub fro there and be back in order. I did so but was still unable to boot into Kubuntu. I then did a full install of Mepis so that I could easily get on the internet (we have this dang HTTP proxy and static IPs that would need setting after each reboot of a live CD) and I'm working feverishly to get back to some working condition. Things under Mepis aren't as simple as I remember them being years ago when I was hooked. Now I just want my old partition back and bootable. Can anyone help! I'm desparate!

[penguin.ch]

Re: HELP!! I deleted an old partition and now I can't boot!

Could you please show to us the content of /dev/sda1/boot/grub/menu.lst (in particular the "kernel list" part) ...!?

[Cliff76]

Re: HELP!! I deleted an old partition and now I can't boot!

Thanx soo much for your help! Here's my menu.lst as it exists now in my /dev/sda6 (bootable Mepis partition)
[snip]
timeout 15
color cyan/blue white/blue
foreground ffffff
background 0639a1

gfxmenu /boot/grub/message

title MEPIS at sda6, kernel 2.6.15-26-386
root (hd0,5)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.15-26-386 root=/dev/sda6 nomce quiet vga=791
boot

title KUbuntu at sda1, kernel 2.6.15-28-686
root (hd0,1)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.15-28-686 root=/dev/sda2 ro quiet splash
savedefault
boot

title MEMTEST
kernel /boot/memtest86+.bin

[/snip]

Here's a list of kernels available on /dev/sda1/boot
[snip]
ccc@1[boot]$ ls vmlinuz-2.6.1*
vmlinuz-2.6.12-10-386 vmlinuz-2.6.15-22-386 vmlinuz-2.6.15-26-386
vmlinuz-2.6.12-10-686-smp vmlinuz-2.6.15-22-686 vmlinuz-2.6.15-26-686
vmlinuz-2.6.12-9-386 vmlinuz-2.6.15-23-386 vmlinuz-2.6.15-27-386
vmlinuz-2.6.12-9-686-smp vmlinuz-2.6.15-23-686 vmlinuz-2.6.15-27-686
vmlinuz-2.6.15-21-386 vmlinuz-2.6.15-25-386 vmlinuz-2.6.15-28-386
vmlinuz-2.6.15-21-686 vmlinuz-2.6.15-25-686 vmlinuz-2.6.15-28-686
[/snip]

I'm gonna reboot one more time and try it out.

[Cliff76]

Re: HELP!! I deleted an old partition and now I can't boot!

Still not working! I rebooted with the above menu.lst and got:
root (hd0,1)
Filesystem type unknown, partition type 0x5
Error 17 Cannot mount selected partition

It is a reiserfs formatted partition. Does that make a difference somehow? Also I had a similar problem when I first cloned the partition. GParted reported an error 1/2 thru the copy saying something like cannot work on a busy devices and when I did boot into it I had to do some disk maintanance with one of those low level tools like fschk or something. I can't remember the details or the exact tool I was using.

[cantab]

Re: HELP!! I deleted an old partition and now I can't boot!

Reiserfs will be just fine.

Try changing the menu.lst as follows. Changes are in bold. Remember that GRUB counts both disks and partitions from ZERO.

Thanx soo much for your help! Here's my menu.lst as it exists now in my /dev/sda6 (bootable Mepis partition)
[snip]
timeout 15
color cyan/blue white/blue
foreground ffffff
background 0639a1

gfxmenu /boot/grub/message

title MEPIS at sda6, kernel 2.6.15-26-386
root (hd0,5)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.15-26-386 root=/dev/sda6 nomce quiet vga=791
boot

title KUbuntu at sda1, kernel 2.6.15-28-686
root (hd0,0)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.15-28-686 root=/dev/sda1 ro quiet splash
savedefault
boot

title MEMTEST
kernel /boot/memtest86+.bin

[/snip]

Here's a list of kernels available on /dev/sda1/boot
[snip]
ccc@1[boot]$ ls vmlinuz-2.6.1*
vmlinuz-2.6.12-10-386 vmlinuz-2.6.15-22-386 vmlinuz-2.6.15-26-386
vmlinuz-2.6.12-10-686-smp vmlinuz-2.6.15-22-686 vmlinuz-2.6.15-26-686
vmlinuz-2.6.12-9-386 vmlinuz-2.6.15-23-386 vmlinuz-2.6.15-27-386
vmlinuz-2.6.12-9-686-smp vmlinuz-2.6.15-23-686 vmlinuz-2.6.15-27-686
vmlinuz-2.6.15-21-386 vmlinuz-2.6.15-25-386 vmlinuz-2.6.15-28-386
vmlinuz-2.6.15-21-686 vmlinuz-2.6.15-25-686 vmlinuz-2.6.15-28-686
[/snip]

I'm gonna reboot one more time and try it out.

You'll also need to fix /etc/fstab on the clone install. You should have a line like the following at present:

/dev/sda2    /        reiserfs  defaults,errors=remount-ro 0    1

change it to sda1. Do that from Mepis or a live environment.
Hope that works.

[Cliff76]

Re: HELP!! I deleted an old partition and now I can't boot!

cantab

Thanx but It's still not working. I made you changes in both files (I completely missed the references to /dev/sda2) and rebooted but I still get this:

Uncompressing Linux... Ok. Booting the kernel.
[17179573.304000] Kernel Panic - not syncing: VFS: unable to mount root fs on unknown block (0,0)

From the looks of the error it appears to be finding the Kubuntu kernel but having trouble mounting the root file system. Any other ideas? Thanks again for your help.

Cliff

[penguin.ch]

Re: HELP!! I deleted an old partition and now I can't boot!

Any other ideas?

Adding an "initrd" line may (or may not) make a difference
- below a copy of my according menu entry (to be modified):

title		Kubuntu 06.10 (Kernel 2.6.17-11)
root		(hd0,1)
kernel		/boot/vmlinuz-2.6.17-11-generic root=/dev/sda2 ro quiet splash
initrd		/boot/initrd.img-2.6.17-11-generic

[Cliff76]

Re: HELP!! I deleted an old partition and now I can't boot!

Thanx UnicornRider!

That did the trick! I'm back in Kubuntu where all of my stuff is working again!