One Hundred Papercuts

[GRUB]No way to restore Startup Manager

Bug #424992 reported by Alejandro Vidal
10
This bug affects 1 person
Affects Status Importance Assigned to Milestone
Bootloader Manager
Confirmed
Undecided
Unassigned
One Hundred Papercuts
New
Undecided
Unassigned
ubiquity
New
Undecided
Unassigned

Bug Description

A lot of users, like me, have MS Win and Ubuntu installed on their PC's (Win to Game, Ubuntu to Live :D )

The problem, comes when we reinstall MS Win when it fails ( a lot of times). Doing this, deletes GRUB and replaces it with Windows Start Up menu.

So, no way to further access Ubuntu, without reinstalling it.

A "simple" solution could be add one more option in the Installer CD "Restore StartUp Manager" with few grub commands.

I Know, it's not really a papercut, because affects only users with dual-boot. BUT, we hope a lot of users to jump and install Ubuntu in this release to try it, but they will not erase thir Win installation, not now. The best way to give a better migration is to give tools to solve issues when living in both worlds (like Gub restore, share docs, auto check NTFS drives, etc.)

Revision history for this message
Hercules_100_98 (hercules-100-98) wrote :

You are correct, this isn't exactly a papercut, but it is an easy fix (the fix is only 4 terminal commands) and could be quickly implemented

Changed in ubuntu-bootloader-manager:
status: New → Confirmed
Revision history for this message
Alejandro Vidal (mancvso) wrote :

Having an option in the Installer CD will help a lot of users i know were having issues with Grub

Revision history for this message
Alan Searchwell (searchie) wrote :

I have adopted a solution to this problem that involves the use of Grub4Dos. When installing Ubuntu, I use the "advanced" button on the last page of the install process and tell the installer to install grub on the root partition of the new linux installation.

Once the installation is finished I reboot and in the windows environment copy the file "grldr" to the Windows boot drive (usuallu C:) and add a line 'C:\GRLDR="Start GRUB"' to the boot.ini. That's it. When I reboot the XP bootloader has the option to start GRUB. On choosing that option, grub4daos magically finds the installed menu.lst file and you can boot into Linux.

When Windows is re-installed, restoring the ability to boot into linux is as simple as copying grldr to the Windows boot drive and adding the line to boot.ini again. For Vista the approach gets a little more involved since the new BCD file has to be edited but someone has written a little batch file that will do the edits for you. It's all in the README_GRUB4DOS.txt file that comes with grub4dos.

It would be nice if ubiquity could automate all of this for us but, I don't know if the need for this is really widespread. Also the process for Vista/Windows7 does not lend itself to automation since adding an entry to the Vista boot menu involves interacting with Vista's BCDEdit utility (A horrible little piece of software IMHO) and hence must be done from the Windows environment.

Revision history for this message
Przemek K. (azrael) wrote :

The Ubuntu alternate CD and Live/Alt combo DVD has an option to recover a broken system.

Revision history for this message
Przemek K. (azrael) wrote :

Also see https://help.ubuntu.com/community/RecoveringUbuntuAfterInstallingWindows

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