• Registered: 2012-02-03
  • Posts: 7

Topic: [Solved] Help with re-installing grub

Hi guys I have been using a mbp for a couple years now, dual booting with bootcamp win 7 when I need to. Before that I built a hackintosh, and before that I used to use Ubuntu Ubuntu 4.10 (i'm talking waaay back).  Anyways, I recently came across an old HP Dv1000 laptop and figured I'd put it to use with a small linux distro.  I could Crunchbang and the rest is history. 

Anyways, I am going traveling and figured it'd be the perfect computer to bring overseas in case it gets jacked or breaks, no real loss.  I love crunchbang, but my buddy who is traveling with me needs windows 7.  so i did some research and found I could install windows 7 with xp drivers and whatnot and so i did.  I made sure to use gparted to resize the original 2 partition (100gigs SDA1 plus a small swap partition). I formatted the newly created unallocated partition fat32 so the windows installer could see it, and reformatted the partition in windows installer, and continued with installation.  Mind you I'd been running a single OS configuration for over a month (crunchbang) and I know from past experience with old ubuntu that its easy to install win 7 first and Linux after so Grub can account for both OS's.  Anyways, I figured i could rewrite grub after all was done.   Only, a lot has changed it seems.  I really need to brush up on my terminal usage, its been to long.

So now I can boot to windows 7 and i even edited the windows 7 bootmanager with easybcd to open the linux partition in the boot menu, but when i select it it just hangs with the cursor flashing...

I decided i'd try reinstalling grub on the SDA1 partition with my crunchbang on it.  So i booted a live crunchbang, and opened up terminal and did this:

sudo fdisk -l

I find my linux partiton is SDA1

so then I type:

sudo mount /dev/sda1 /mnt

That mounts my hd linux partiton, everything so far is good!

now it is time to reinstall grub on SDA1, right?

sudo grub-install --root-directory=/mnt /dev/sda

this spits back something saying" grub-install not found" or doesnt exist...

Am I missing something here? i dont mind if grub becomes my boot manager, infact i'd prefer that... just i cant understand why i cant reinstall grub with a command, am I doing something wrong?

Last edited by mikeosoft (2012-02-04 04:31:37)

  • Registered: 2012-02-03
  • Posts: 7

Re: [Solved] Help with re-installing grub

hi i just tried again, this time I went into windows 7 and used easybcd to change a few settings, and i saw i had selected grub and not grub2 as the linux boot type! yikes

Low and behold, I am writing you from a working dual boot the unconventional way, Linux first, Win 7 installed after.  Easy BCD win bootmanager is configured to handle my boot up now. 

I just need to research how to tell crunchbang to mount the windows ntfs partiton upon every bootup... I'm guessing its in a startup config somewhere...

  • ethrg
  • #! CrunchBanger
  • Offline
  • From: over by the thing
  • Registered: 2012-01-30
  • Posts: 125

Re: [Solved] Help with re-installing grub

Well awesome mate! Don't forget to change the topic status to reflect that your issue has been solved, unless of course you want to hear more about it.

Forums are boring, drinking is awesome.

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