Ubuntu
grub2 package

After updating 11.10 to 12.04, no longer boots with "no such partition " error

Asked by James Neave

When I installed 11.04 on my living room machine, I paid special attention to how I partitioned my SSD.

I created an GPT table instead of MBR, aligned the partition with the erase blocks and created some sort of backwards compatibility partition at the beginning of the drive.

Then I installed Ubuntu, booted into a live disk, mounted the disk, chroot'ed to the mount point and did, er, install grub or update grub or something.

This worked. It also worked when I upgraded 11.04 to 11.10 the week before 12.04 came out in preparation of upgrading.

After I rebooted from the 12.04 upgrade, I get a grub screen telling me it can't find a partition and I'm left with the option to boot 2.6 or 3.0 kernel (both of which give the partition error)

Can somebody tell me how to fix it?

Sorry the information is a bit scant, but, my computer is broken! So I have to write all this from memory at work. :(

(I used the following document to set up my partition: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Solid_State_Drives#Tips_for_Maximizing_SSD_Performance )

Regards,

James.

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Ubuntu grub2 Edit question
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Spider Tara
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Revision history for this message
actionparsnip (andrew-woodhead666) said : 		#1

have you fsck'd your partition?

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James Neave (roboj1m) said : 		#2

No, I haven't touched it as I don't want to break it any further.

I shall try that this evening.

Just sudo fsck /dev/sda1 from a live disk, yes?

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Aditya Goturu (aditya3098) said : 		#3

Do "sudo fdisk -l" from a live cd and post it here

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Spider Tara (spideryada) said : 		#4

Hey James,

error: no such partition

I came accross that problem yesterday when I tried to install 12.04 on a friends computer. I was able to easily fix the problem by booting "Boot Repair", http://www.ubuntugeek.com/boot-repair-simple-tool-to-repair-frequent-boot-problems.html

This is an awesome tool that has save my butt on many occassions.

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Spider Tara (spideryada) said : 		#5

You can download the iso file from http://sourceforge.net/p/boot-repair/
This site is temporarily down. Keep trying.
Burn the image file on to a cd or flash drive. Boot to the drive and click on repair.
It's that simple.

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Best Spider Tara (spideryada) said : 		#6

Another solution is to boot to a Live CD, open a terminal and install "Boot Repair"

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:yannubuntu/boot-repair
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install boot-repair-ubuntu

Then run it from the Live CD

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dfanton (davor-fanton) said : 		#7

Hi James!
I have the same boot problem on machine where was SSD boot disk and HDD additional.
Upgrade to 12.04 gave me missing boot device error.
I am interested if you managed to use Boot Repair to solve this, and which method of the those above have you used?
Regards
Davor

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James Neave (roboj1m) said : 		#8

Hello everybody, thanks for all your responses.

Davor: I have not tried anything at the moment.

When I get home (it's 5pm, work is done!) I will be trying the following:

fsck -l from a live disk

Boot Repair from a live disk

I'll post the results I get later tonight or tomorrow when I'm back in work.

Thanks.

James.

Revision history for this message
James Neave (roboj1m) said : 		#9

Here's my boot repair URL, which I'm storing here for now (as I'm on a live disk)

Let's see what reboot does.

http://paste.ubuntu.com/968353/

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James Neave (roboj1m) said : 		#10

Hi,

Boot Repair worked.

I booted a 12.04 live disk and installed Boot Repair using:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:yannubuntu/boot-repair
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install boot-repair (-ubuntu was not necessary)

Hit the button and it worked.

One other thing though, now it always wait n seconds to boot, how do I set that back to hiding grub unless I hold down control?

Thanks,

James.

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James Neave (roboj1m) said : 		#11

Thanks Spider Tara, that solved my question.

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Spider Tara (spideryada) said : 		#12

boot-repair
Advanced
Uncheck Unhide Menu or change the amount of seconds

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James Neave (roboj1m) said : 		#13

Thanks!

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Bryce Nesbitt (bryce2) said : 		#14

The answer that worked for me was http://askubuntu.com/questions/125428/grub-complains-of-no-such-partition-after-installing-1204