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Need help recovering from a failed Ubuntu upgrade [solved]

Posted: Tue Jun 12, 2007 2:01 pm
by smudge
My problem is this: I was in the middle of an upgrade from Ubuntu Edgy Eft to Feisty Fawn, when I had to leave, and had to force the upgrade to quit. I then shut down and left for vacation for a week. When I came back, I went to finish the upgrade, but when I got to the grub screen, there was suddenly 2 versions to pick from, which made sense, since I was in the middle of an upgrade, but neither version or their recovery modes would boot. After trying a few different tactics, I booted into my win 2000 server and formatted the linux drive. I shut down, and try to boot, but i get a message that says:

GRUB Loading stage1.5.
GRUB loading, please wait...
Error 17

and then it does nothing. I put my Feisty Fawn cd in to maybe install it clean and reinstall grub, but it doesn't load the screen and comes back to the error message.
I now can't boot any OS, and I really, really don't want to do a clean reinstall.

Now that I think about it, I will try the live cd of Ubuntu dapper drake i have, and if i can find it the windows boot disk while I'm waiting for a response. Any and all help will be greatly appreciated.

Posted: Tue Jun 12, 2007 7:56 pm
by aaronhall
Well since you already cleaned off the linux drive, you have little choice but to install fiesty clean. To get into windows (if it's installed on a separate drive), get into cmos and set that drive as the first boot device. Change the first boot device to your cd-rom drive to reinstall.

Posted: Tue Jun 12, 2007 8:55 pm
by smudge
Sigh, nothing happened.

I tried the feisty fawn disc I burned from the iso off of the website (wow that took forever! :D) and nothing happened, it pretended it wasn't there (yes, I set first boot device to cd). I put the cd in the xp machine I'm using now (not on boot, I'll try that as soon as I'm done posting here) and an ubuntu splash screen came up, and got replaced by an error with title 'start' that said "The specified file was not found". That was it, it failed.

I then tried my Dapper Drake cd, and that worked fine, so I booted the live cd, and told it to install. I got to partitions, treading carefully so that I didn't wipe my windows drive. It told me I have two drives arranged like so:

Code: Select all

-hda (19.14 GB)
  -hda1 - ntfs  (12.69 GB) - flagged as 'boot'
  -hda2 - fat32 (6.44 GB)
-hdb (13.96 GB)
  -hdb1 - fat32        (9.76 GB) - flagged as 'lba'
  -hdb3 - fat16        (3.72 GB) - flagged as 'boot lba'
  -hdb2 - extended     (243.17 MB)
    -hdb5 - linux-swap (243.14 MB)
  -unallocated         (251.02 MB)
I know for certain I don't want hda, that's my windows drive, but what's going on in hdb? what does 'lba' and 'boot lba' mean? I'm pretty sure that I previously assigned the hdb2 partition as my swap space. BTW, I said I wiped the linux drive. I just meant the partition that windows refused to read. If I remember right, I think I formatted that drive to be fat32, which sounds right since I remember partitioning that at 10 GB.

I also have this wonderful boot loader/partitioner disk that boots itself from floppy called BootIt. If you are familiar with it, could I use that in any way?

Posted: Tue Jun 12, 2007 10:02 pm
by smudge
Ok, grub is wiped, and windows is working again. Thanx for the help.