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Had win7 and ubuntu installed on laptop and inadvertently selected the recovery option in boot menu - exited and now all I get is

error: no such partition grub rescue>

set returns:

prefix=(hd,0,msdos6)/boot/grub
root=hd0,msdos6

ls returns:

(hd0) (hd0,msdos5) (hd,0,msdos3) (hd0,msdos2) (hd0,msdos1)

'normal' not available and I dearly love to not have to stick my oem recovery disc in any other info I can give please ask...

any help would be muchly appreciated.

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By recovery, you probably mean your OS recovery partition, not Ubuntu, right? – Rilindo Jul 4 '11 at 20:17
well - I'm hoping everything is still there - hoping its just borked grub settings but if re_installing ubuntu is the solution then thats not such a massive bind – ToonMariner Jul 4 '11 at 20:22
Hmm... what I'd do... at the Grub prompt, type "root=(hd0,xxx)", where "xxx" is the partition you want -- if you don't know it, just hit Tab twice after the comma and you'll get recommendations. Once you've set the root, you can ls to inspect the file system, and then set linux=/boot/vmlinuz or whatever it is, plus root parameters, and try booting (boot). – Kerrek SB Jul 4 '11 at 20:44
no optins on tabbing and get Unknown command 'boot' – ToonMariner Jul 4 '11 at 20:50
This question has come up twice on SuperUser in the past two days alone: one two Is it the fashion to delete one's Ubuntu partition, this week, or something? ☺ – JdeBP Jul 4 '11 at 21:36
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If you still have your Ubuntu (and hopefully it is the live disk), boot off that. Browse through the file systems on both your Windows and Linux partitions. If you can get to both, you're fine; you just need to reinstall grub.

Just remember a couple of things:

  • In linux, partition numbers start at 1 and disk starts with letters. With grub, they both are numbers and start from 0.

  • Worse, sometimes BIOS "lies" to grub about the device mapping. You will need to verify your mapping in device map file under /boot directory

  • Make sure to find out the location of your windows partition and boot loader. Fortunately, it probably still exists under /boot/grub, so you probably won't have to make any changes - just reinstallation.

Here are a couple of things that will help you out.

http://www.dedoimedo.com/computers/grub.html

http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/ubuntu/reinstall-ubuntu-grub-bootloader-after-windows-wipes-it-out/

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stuck the live disk in - ubuntu partition had been completely wiped out by the windows recovery effort (even though I exited without doing anything!) just free space remained to format an install on. Did that and I assume grub was fixed as linux was now 'back' although will concede it prob re-installed grub too – ToonMariner Jul 4 '11 at 23:38
Ouch. I didn't realize that the recovery actually wiped out the Ubuntu partition (although having it not touch the windows partition seems odd). – Rilindo Jul 4 '11 at 23:53
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