So my awesome windows/osx86/ubuntu tri-boot machine I set up many moons ago is now pretty much kaput. Reinstalling XP was a really, really, really bad move, it turns out. It overwrote my hacked GRUB menu, so I could only use XP. Then, to make matters worse, XP somehow lost its ethernet card drivers, so I can’t get to the intertubes from the XP partition. So after 30 days, XP commits seppeku since I never activated it, since I couldn’t activate it, since it couldn’t access the net.
So basically I was stuck with a computer with 3 operating systems installed, but the only one which was accessible was the one which didn’t work. Then I discovered that by putting in the OSx86 disk, I can re-access my OSx partition, and re-bless the hard drive to make OSx the default OS. Now this is an improvement over a broken windows, but what I’m really looking for is the Ubuntu. Actually, I want the GRUB menu back so I can pick whichever I want, but I really have need of ubuntu right now.
So I try re-installing ubuntu. Actually, first I try downloading my torrent via the live image (I’m trying to use it as a torrent server), but it can’t see the ext3 partition on the hard drive for some reason, and it can’t write to ntfs or hfs+, so it tries to write it to the live disk and of course that fails, but first it seeds for an hour and a half before telling me it failed. Whee.
So I go to reinstall GRUB, since I know how to do it in Ubuntu, but after about 5 minutes I remember that I’m in the live disk’s filesystem, not the hard drive, and not only is installing GRUB pointless on a CD, it’s also impossible.
Tomorrow I’m going to try…something. Maybe a hammer would fix it up? This could end with me wiping the hard drive and starting over…If all the OS’s used the same filesystem I wouldn’t encounter these problems, because I could mount the mac or windows partition from linux and write the torrented files to them, or edit the GRUB menu on the linux partition from mac…We should all just use zfs…
Oh man, does that bring back memories.
What I’d recommend, personally, is getting some sort of Linux live CD. That’ll allow you to mount your Linux partition and get any files you want to somewhere safe. In addition, some live CDs come with GRUB, so you could reinstall that.
To start, there’s the Linux From Scratch live CD. Linux From Scratch (LFS) is designed for building Linux from the ground up, so it’s packed with all kinds of source. Never mind that, though; what you’ll care about is GRUB. It’s also got the standard command-line utilities for partition managing. I’ve had some trouble with the 6.2 version not detecting my drive, so you might want to try the 6.1 version.
http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/livecd/
Another fun one is AntiX, a recent MEPIS fork. It’s designed for older systems with limited resources. I haven’t played around with it too much, but you might want to give it a whirl.
http://www.mepis.org/node/13723
If you don’t like partition managing from the command line, there’s always the GParted partition-managing live CD. Combined with the LFS live CD above, it’s saved my bacon at least twice now.
http://gparted.sourceforge.net/
And, of course, everyone’s favorite is Knoppix. I haven’t used it in a while, but it’s chock-full of tools. Dunno if it has GRUB, though.
http://www.knoppix.net/
Even if none of those work out, it’s handy to have the images around. They’re definitely useful tools. Hope that helps, and good luck!