[ale] What is grub > and I Killed Access to Desktop

[Michael H. Warfield]

On Wed, 2013-01-16 at 08:30 -0500, Marc Ferguson wrote:
> Hi folks,
> 
> I really screwed the pooch on this one. I have two issues: 1) how to use
> GRUB recovery console and 2) non-bootable LiveUSB. So; here's my first
> issue. I have two hard drives and my original setup was:
> 
> * sda1 - windows (marked as boot)
> * sda2 - /boot
> * sda3 - lvm (fedora)
> * sdb1 - data
> 
> With the release of Fedora 18 I figured I'll finally remove my Windows
> partition and turn it into a home directory. I fire up gparted and do just
> that. I'm not familiar with UUID so I simply changed the "label" to "home."
> I then use rsync to copy my existing /home directory into the new
> partition. All seems well...
> 
> I reboot and after GRUB selects the latest instance of Fedora 17 I'm sent
> to some sort of recovery mode. I can only log in as root.

Well, it may be too late at this point but I believe what you ran into
here is systemd's emergency recovery mode.  That's the equivalent of
maintenance mode in SystemV Init or Upstart.  Having seen this several
times myself I can take a guess that your /etc/fstab file was probably
screwed up with your changes in the partitioning.  Seems like systemd is
particularly unhelpful with error messages there unless you know all the
correct message commands to ask it nicely.

> My data partition
> is still mounted, but my newly created home partition no longer shows any
> data in it. I wonder if it has something to do with me changing it from
> NTFS to ext4.

Were you sure it even got mounted?  I'm guessing it didn't.

> Either way I'm thinking that my GRUB is pointing to the wrong partition and
> stupidly run "grub install /dev/sda1". Now when I reboot and GRUB fires it
> immediately goes into a GRUB recovery console and I'm completely lost at
> this point.

Ouch.  My next step would be to use the Fedora boot media to go into
recovery mode but I see you're having problems with that as well.  You
should be able to read up on grub and get it to boot off your /dev/sda2
boot partition.  You might try this...

http://askubuntu.com/questions/197833/recovering-from-grub-rescue-crash

> At this point I feel I've gone way down into the rabbit hole. I dont' mind
> losing the home directories since my data partition is still functioning. I
> want to just start fresh and do a clean install of Fedora 18. My main beef
> is I can't boot from the newly created Fedora 18 LiveUSB. It works on my
> laptop, but not on my desktop. When in GRUB recovery I ran "grub> usb" and
> it's supposed to show any USB's plugged in, but nothing shows up.

You might try changing your boot device in the BIOS.  Varies from BIOS
to BIOS but my Dells I just hit F12 while in the BIOS screen and then
select the USB drive.  If you don't see it there, you're probably going
to need to burn a DVD and boot from hard media.

> -- 
> *Marc Ferguson*
> 
> www.fergytech.com | www.digitalalias.net
> 
> *"When life gives me lemons... I make Linuxaide, hmm good stuff!"*

Regards,
Mike
-- 
Michael H. Warfield (AI4NB) | (770) 985-6132 |  mhw at WittsEnd.com
   /\/\|=mhw=|\/\/          | (678) 463-0932 |  http://www.wittsend.com/mhw/
   NIC whois: MHW9          | An optimist believes we live in the best of all
 PGP Key: 0x674627FF        | possible worlds.  A pessimist is sure of it!
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