No Dualboot at all - grubs os-prober broken?

Naik · 2016-09-05 18:51:22

Ok, so i see that there is still something to explain:

I have four primary partitions none of them is extended and no lvm is set up.
I would be happy to rearrange the content of my hdd, but i don`t think this will help me, since the problem can not (fully and only) be related to win (XP).
As i stated above it is no matter what OS i install on /dev/sda4: the bootloader it brings up will render my system unbootable (yes, other linux distros / grub installations did this too) and leaving the bootloader untouched results in the grub that can see everything but boots nothing but BL.

Head_on_a_Stick wrote:

Naik wrote:
EDIT: Managed to get rid of bios-pw and saw that there is only one option (possibly) referring
to my problem:
Multiboot: Enabled
Have you tried installing another operating system on /dev/sda4 since you made this change?
If "Multiboot" was disabled beforehand then that may be why the GRUB step was failing with other distributions.

I never made any change... Multiboot was enabled all the time. But as things turned out this has nothing to do with the process described at all because disabling multiboot only results in the lack of a possibility to F9 into the bios boot option menu in order to alter the boot priority.

naik --greetz

Head_on_a_Stick · 2016-09-05 19:23:33

Naik wrote:

Oleaving the bootloader untouched results in the grub that can see everything but boots nothing but BL.

The grub.cfg you posted had a Windows XP entry and I am not very familiar with the booting idiosyncrasies of that OS.

Perhaps if you tried a Debian or Arch system on /dev/sda4 then reboot into BunsenLabs and post the output of `grub-mkconfig` here, it would be much easier for me to spot any errors.

The output of this command would show if there are any errors during the GRUB installation process itself:

sudo grub-install --recheck /dev/sda

(as I already mentioned in a previous post)

Bearded_Blunder · 2016-09-05 20:45:15

In addition to HoaS's sound advice, I'd also consider installing and running testdisk, or running it from a live cd, it's possible there's some error in the partition table behind some of the problems, testdisk can analyse and repair many such. The error posted in your first post is leading me to suspect something of the sort.

Being a laptop (you mentioned) I'd also be inclined to run badblocks over the drive in non-destructive read write mode

sudo badblocks -svn /dev/sda

just to be sure it's in good order, laptop drives tend to suffer as a result of bumps or sudden movements while running. Note that can take a long time to complete, but generally forces reallocation and replacement of any failing sectors by the drive's firmware..

Or bring out the big guns: dd over sda from /dev/zero and start over on a truly clean drive.. I'd bet actual cash the grub problem wouldn't reoccur with a fresh partition table & MBR written to a clean drive, though XP will never boot where it's currently placed, if you do resort to that, bear in mind XP doesn't understand GPT and must go on an MS-DOS/MBR partitioned drive.

rationale wrote:

If at any point in the drive's history it has been configured GPT, the partition information is located differently on (other end of) the drive, unless something like (windows) DISKPART CLEAN (linux) gdisk zap, or the entire drive is overwritten (dd, badblocks destructive test) the gpt information remains on disk from the previous configuration, this may be confusing grub. As a matter of personal taste, I prefer writing every sector of laptop drives before redeployment in different configurations, simply because of the "hard life" they live, to give the firmware chance to remap failing sectors.

Last edited by Bearded_Blunder (2016-09-08 12:26:42)

#21 2016-09-05 18:51:22

Re: No Dualboot at all - grubs os-prober broken?

#22 2016-09-05 19:23:33

Re: No Dualboot at all - grubs os-prober broken?

#23 2016-09-05 20:45:15

Re: No Dualboot at all - grubs os-prober broken?

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