technology

Reinstalling GRUB

In one of my previous posts I mentioned some troubles regarding reinstalling Ubuntu 22, loosing ability to select OS and to boot at all actually. I found that Ubuntu 20 recognizes properly my fresh Windows installation but Ubuntu 22 does not. So I stayed with version 20 however here was no OS selection, which translates to broken GRUB installation. After Ubuntu 20 installation finished it tried to put bootloader but failed to do this because of drives numbering. My first drive in Lenovo Thinkpad T420s is mSATA but computer and operating system thinks that this is my second drive. My actual second drive is SSD located in regular drive bay. So, this is something that developers have not cover properly.

However you can fix this but booting Ubuntu 20 from USB/CD media and try live session. Open terminal and mount installed Ubuntu filesystem and then chroot into it.

mkdir /mnt/newroot
mount /dev/sdXY /mnt/newroot
mount --bind /proc /mnt/newroot/proc
mount --bind /sys /mnt/newroot/sys
mount --bind /dev /mnt/newroot/dev
chroot /mnt/newroot
grub-install /dev/sdX # put only drive letter and not partition number
update-grub # see whether it recognized all operating systems
exit
reboot

Then go to BIOS/UEFI and put your drive with /dev/sdX on first boot place before other drives. You can leave USB/CD/Network boot before, but do not put there other drives as they might also have bootsectors filled with bootloaders. Now after reboot, you see GRUB with OS selection.

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