Grub problems after upgrading

Asked by Mauricio A

So, basically after upgrading to 11.04 and doing a million things my system works but GRUB is being a roulette. I'll try to make this as short as possible:

Initially I had 6 partitions in 2 hard drives:
In the first drive two NTFS partitions (sda1 and sda2, with labels F and C), one with only files and the other one with a non-free operative system installed (that I rarely used, but still worked).

In the second drive I had 4 partitions: The first one (sdb1, labelled Archivos) was a big NTFS partitions with files only that I used all the time with Ubuntu (this is where I saved most of my files).
Then I had 2 ext4 partitions (sdb4 and sdb2). sdb4 had Ubuntu 10.10, which I used every day. sdb2 was from an older Ubuntu installation that wasn't working anymore, and I'm not sure why I kept it.
Finally sbd3 was an extended partition with the swap area.

So, I decided to upgrade Ubuntu the easy way, but since I was scared of things going badly I decided to make a backup of my whole sdb4 partition with Ubuntu inside. For this I shrinked the sda2 NTFS partition and copied the sdb4 partition in the unallocated space using GParted live CD.

After that I rebooted Ubuntu and upgraded it to 11.04.
Something went wrong, because after the upgrade was complete Grub was all broken: the arrow keys didn't do anything and pressing enter gave me an error.
I tried everything but figured the best I could do was to reinstall grub. Since I couldn't boot to any operative system I grabbed and old Linux Mint CD that I had and tried to install grub from there, but I didn't know how to, so I had no choice but to install Mint in the sdb2 partition (the old Ubuntu partition that didn't work and I wasn't using anymore), and hope for it to install GRUB after finishing installing Mint.

So, now Grub works again, and I can boot to Mint (which I plan on deleting once this is fixed) or Ubuntu 11.04 or Ubuntu 10.10.
The problem is, if I try to boot to Ubuntu there's a 50% chance it will boot to 10.10 and a 50% chance it will boot to 11.04. There are a million options to boot from (different kernels?), but even if I always select the same it's completely random.

So basically, how can I fix this? Both 10.10 and 11.04 are working, but I can't choose where to boot...
If I need to post more information about my partitions just tell me.
Sorry for being too long and sorry for my bad English.

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Ubuntu grub2 Edit question
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Mauricio A
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delance (olivier-delance) said :
#1

Too complicated configuration!
To reinstall Grub2 from CD: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Grub2#Reinstalling%20from%20LiveCD .
Grub2 see too many Linux instances. The best should be to boot from Ubuntu CD with "Try" option. Then you can remove useless instances of Linux (Mint and 10.10), recover the freed space for other partition, and finally to reinstall Grub2. If you hesitate to remove these distros, you could rename /boot folder on those partitions, so Grub2 will not find them and will make a boot menu with only Windows and 11.04.

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Mauricio A (mauricio-alfonso-88) said :
#2

Renaming the /boot folder seems like a good idea, since I'm not sure which installation is in which partition. Will try later and report back.

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Mauricio A (mauricio-alfonso-88) said :
#3

I'm planning to keep the old 10.10 installation and delete the 11.04 partition, but I don't know which installation is in which partition!
Renaming the /boot to /boot folder on 11.04 doesn't work: as soon as I reboot the computer a new /boot directory is generated, with a grub folder inside! (right next to the renamed /boot)

Revision history for this message
Mauricio A (mauricio-alfonso-88) said :
#4

Opening my computer and disconnecting the hard drives manually I'm now convinced 10.10 is definitely on sda.
Deleting the sdb4 partition is definitely the way to go.

Revision history for this message
Mauricio A (mauricio-alfonso-88) said :
#5

problem solved