[System] Kubuntu was murdered on my computer last night

[vineyridge]

and I made it worse today.

Everything in my installation was going well. Last night, I did all my updates through the terminal per instructions from here, and it looked as if everything worked correctly. Then I went to install Vivaldi through the terminal, and I entered and entered commands per the Wiki instruction posted here. But I didn't realize that the blue bar at the bottom of a code window was a slider until the very end. So nothing I did worked. Then I figured the slider out, followed the code instruction, and it looked like Vivaldi had been installed. Computer was functioning correctly when I shut it off.

This morning when I fired up, the Kubuntu disk with GRUB2 whined and whined and didn't boot. Finally Windows 7 showed up. So I rebooted to Boot-Disk-Repair and told it to automatically fix the boot. It instructed me to save the MBR, Partition Tables and file system; I did. But in a moment of ignorance and mental weakness, I saved the backup to the desktop of the boot disk. After the repair finished, I was told to reboot. I did. That meant that I lost the backup. On reboot, I got a message that the OS on sda (Kubuntu disk) was missing, so I'm assuming that Boot-Repair wiped the MBR, the partition table and the file system.

Since there is nothing on that disk yet but Kubuntu, should I just go ahead and re-install?

[jglen490]

So two things to consider, since your machine is apparently a dual boot system, with Kubuntu and Windows.

First, if you can still boot Windows, and it's entirely in tact, then before you do anything else make sure that any important data on the Windows side is backed up.

Second, if you have no important data on the Kubuntu side, then a reinstall would probably be the simplest and surest solution. Even on my slow, old laptop playground system, almost any Linux takes about 30 minutes from boot the Live installer to having a working Linux. If there was any chance that there was any valuable data on the Kubuntu side, then it may be worthwhile to have someone help you to recover. When the system says it can't find an OS, that doesn't necessarily mean it is gone. It could be that due to the probable MBR issue, the system BIOS just couldn't find a path to the OS.

I don't do dual boot on my personal desktop and laptop machines - get enough of MS Windows at work. Those who know more about dual booting may have a solution for you, and I would hate to be the one to kill two OSes in one post

[Qqmike]

It's not clear what hard drives you have, sda, sdb, ... ? And what's on each one? Does Kubuntu have a separate /home partition (if so, can you access it from Windows or from a live Kubuntu flash drive--and then copy off your data?).

In any case. I can't imagine how a MBR could be nuked, but you might try TestDisk to restore MBR and partitions on your Kubuntu drive. TestDisk will take just a little reading overhead, but it runs easily as I recall (haven't used it in a few years).

https://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk

At the same time, it is easy to re-install Kubuntu, beginning with formatting the drive (which WILL destroy any data on it), say with KDE Partition Manager or with GParted.

[vineyridge]

I have 3 HDDs in my computer and two external HDs. sda is dedicated to KUbuntu OS, sdb is dedicated to Windows 7 OS, and sdc is empty now but is NTFS and will be dedicated to data from both Kubuntu and Windows 7. All of my valuable data is located on one external HD that I can access from both OSes; the other is dedicated to backups. There is nothing worth keeping on sda; I'm just bummed that I wasted so much of my data allowance on installing it and updating it. I plan to copy everything on my external HD to sdc fairly soon. Then I will have redundancy for it.

[Qqmike]

You could try TestDisk, and if it gets bogged down, or if it works but you don't like the end result (after booting into the recovered Kubuntu partition), you could then cut your losses and simply re-install Kubuntu.

[Qqmike]

My how-to may offer some guidance on using TestDisk, how to run it from your live Kubuntu USB:

Using Your Live Kubuntu DVD/USB to Fix Things

https://www.kubuntuforums.net/showth...l=1#post379485

You'll have to read/skim down through it, spotting references to TestDisk. Or use "find" in FireFox.

[woodsmoke]

All good stuff below and...then...i never use CLI to install stuff, don't care what the old groaners say...
I use Synaptic.
period.
Now, can you "chain" stuff in Synaptic, well, it is hard but...
i would rather "waste time" using Synaptic than have everything fall apart on me JUST LIKE IT DID FOR YOU... it happened to me what... 6 years ago...never again...Synaptic all the way.

woody