Desiring to be clever, I unplugged my drive with Windows on it to install Kubuntu by itself on the remaining drive. Fine. I then plugged Windows back in and I was then booting automatically into Kubuntu. Fine. I then began to try to get GRUB to find Windows and give me the option to boot into it. Not fine.
My first line of research led me to the little "grub" command in the cli with which I tried to "root" it and "setup" it, but grub could never find any "stage" files. Checking the /boot/grub directories revealed that they didn't exist.
Well, then I came onto the excellent howtos and guides section of these forums and learned that if one needs a fresh copy of the GRUB files there are four places to get them: something, something, something, and the Super Grub Disk. I went ahead then and mounted the iso, went to the directory with all the "stage" files, and cp'ed them over to my grub directory. Sure enough, there were no overwrites confirming my suspicion than I had no bootloader options to begin with.
Then I made the mistake of rebooting. I was presented with the SGD bootup screen with one option: SuperGrubDisk! "Well," I thought, "no problem, I'll just whip out my liveUSB and copy the GRUB files from one of the other sources mentioned on the forums..." yet when I did this, my Linux drive had mysteriously vanished. Disk management could see the drive, but not mount it or let me touch. At this point, I gave up and tried to do a fresh install. Unfortunately, however, I was so strung out at this point that I selected the wrong drive (sdb1 instead of sdb2 or something) and nuked my Windows install instead.
Now I'm looking at a fresh install of Windows in VirtualBox in my new Kubuntu install and wondering how it all happened... so tell me, if you had gotten yourself to the point where your boot files were overwritten with poisonous SGD ones, what would you have done? Where did I go wrong? Could I have been saved?
My first line of research led me to the little "grub" command in the cli with which I tried to "root" it and "setup" it, but grub could never find any "stage" files. Checking the /boot/grub directories revealed that they didn't exist.
Well, then I came onto the excellent howtos and guides section of these forums and learned that if one needs a fresh copy of the GRUB files there are four places to get them: something, something, something, and the Super Grub Disk. I went ahead then and mounted the iso, went to the directory with all the "stage" files, and cp'ed them over to my grub directory. Sure enough, there were no overwrites confirming my suspicion than I had no bootloader options to begin with.
Then I made the mistake of rebooting. I was presented with the SGD bootup screen with one option: SuperGrubDisk! "Well," I thought, "no problem, I'll just whip out my liveUSB and copy the GRUB files from one of the other sources mentioned on the forums..." yet when I did this, my Linux drive had mysteriously vanished. Disk management could see the drive, but not mount it or let me touch. At this point, I gave up and tried to do a fresh install. Unfortunately, however, I was so strung out at this point that I selected the wrong drive (sdb1 instead of sdb2 or something) and nuked my Windows install instead.
Now I'm looking at a fresh install of Windows in VirtualBox in my new Kubuntu install and wondering how it all happened... so tell me, if you had gotten yourself to the point where your boot files were overwritten with poisonous SGD ones, what would you have done? Where did I go wrong? Could I have been saved?
Comment