Grub not loading shows only flashing grey line.

Asked by Blaise

Ok I was trying to fix my Windows partition, I booted form my XP cd and played around a bit, I didn't change anything. I then changed my boot order back to hard drive first. Now when I try to boot Instead of the grub menu showing up only a grey line shows up flashing about an inch down from top left. I can't do anything except reboot with Ctrl Alt Delete. I can't get into any of my systems, I am on a live CD (NimbleX if it matters) It shows my Windows drive but not my Ubuntu one (Separate hard drives)

Can anyone help?
Thanks

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Ubuntu grub Edit question
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Andre Mangan
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Andre Mangan (kyphi) said :
#1

Your system is probably trying to boot from the wrong hard drive.

Since you have 2 hard drives, try resetting those in the BIOS. It seems most likely that you have reversed the boot order there and you are currently booting from the wrong drive and therefore cannot find GRUB.

Your boot order should be CD first (or floppy) and hard drive last.

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Blaise (nuclear2011) said :
#2

Thanks for the answer I will try that let you know

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Blaise (nuclear2011) said :
#3

I tried that but it didn't work switching the drives in bios but all it did was boot Windows (The order was right) The boot order is correct also. Anything else I can try? I did select the drive while on Windows setup but I never formated or anything. Could grub be corrupt somehow?

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Andre Mangan (kyphi) said :
#4

You can try to restore GRUB this way:

In a terminal type:

sudo grub <you will get a grub prompt after providing your password>
find /boot/grub/stage1 <you will get an output like "(hd0,4)" - note the value output of your system>
root (hd0,4) <substitute the values for your system found in the previous step>
setup (hd0) <0=zero>

When all activity has stopped, close the screen and reboot.

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Blaise (nuclear2011) said :
#5

Where do I type that, I have no access to my Ubuntu partitions, when I boot I only get a gray line that flashes on a blank screen, nothing loads.

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Best Andre Mangan (kyphi) said :
#6

Boot your computer with your Live Ubuntu CD and then go into the Terminal.

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Blaise (nuclear2011) said :
#7

I am on the Live CD , after sudo grub, when I type find /boot/grub/stage1 I get "Error 15: File not found" Also I ran fdisk -l and the hard drive said it was FAT16, it should be 50 gb NTFS and 150 gb ext3... Could I have accidentally formated it, surely formating a 200 gb hard drive would take time, maybe the XP disk relabelled it when I was in there but all my data is still there? Is there some way to restore it?

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Blaise (nuclear2011) said :
#8

I think this has morphed into a different question, one not having to do with grub, I am going to close this question and open a new one, thanks for all you help.

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Blaise (nuclear2011) said :
#9

Thanks Andre Mangan, that solved my question.