Hey thanks,Number 2 this was the only tutorial that worked. I didnt have to do none of that stupid chroot, that I tried from another site. I thought it would be that simple but alot of other tutorials have the backwards chroot method dont know why?

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Hi,
I have a simpler method in my blog.
Restoring the Grub after reinstalling Windows

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admin Reply:
November 3rd, 2009 at 5:36 pm

@R.Srijith , this is for grub 2.I had tried your method,but it didn’t work.

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Rohit Reply:
December 21st, 2011 at 10:50 am

See this method.. it works for me..

http://opensource-sidh.blogspot.com/2011/06/recover-grub-live-ubuntu-cd.html

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manoj Reply:
May 27th, 2010 at 10:15 am

update ur ubuntu man

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My sincere apologies. This DOES WORK!

I was sooo frustrated with having spent an hour plus on this problem. You would think it would be part and parcel with the 9.10 installation.

To recover the grub boot shouldn’t be soooooo hard (or at least the installation should auto-link to this site!!!!, or similar, with correct information regarding the grub2 peculiarities — e.g. no menu.lst.).

But again, my apologies, and sincere thanks for this post.

Cheers

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matt Reply:
March 14th, 2010 at 11:11 am

you should not have to do this at all, windows should not over write an existing boot loader, it’s just irresponsible of them to continue to allow this to happen.

It is a deliberate choice by microsoft to overwrite grub and replace it with their own shitty boot loader with no mention of other operating systems.

Dont blame ubuntu or grub, at least they include windows

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This howto was useful for me twice today.

I`m brazillian, but I`m lucky cause I can read in English. There`s a lack of good tutorials and howtos in Portuguese.

Could I translate some of them?
Mail me so we can talk about it.

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This does work… not so well
I have dual boot machine, xp and ubuntu 9.10
my xp broken, so i reinstall it
then I follow step 2
ubuntu is up and running again
but I cannot get into xp now
some error like device not found or what

any suggestion?

Thanks
Regards
Hendra

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admin Reply:
November 18th, 2009 at 4:09 am

Try manually adding entry for XP in Grub 2.Read this:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1195275

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Charlie Reply:
August 14th, 2010 at 10:09 pm

I had the same problem when I installed Ubuntu 10.4 LTS and windows xp crapped out. I put in the Xp cd, then ran recovery console, then executed fixboot fixmbr, I booted to windows, downloaded grub4dos, and bingo! now I can boot ubuntu from grub.

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Hi,

I am having some roblems in applying this guide (no. 2) after reinstalling windows. I am using a USB to boot using the liveubuntu version and further, when I start typing in the command:
COMMAND: grub-install –root-directory=/mnt/ /dev/sda
RESULT: The file /mnt//boot/grub/stage1 not read correctly.
Stuck here.. need some help to proceed..

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admin Reply:
December 3rd, 2009 at 10:39 pm

Hi,Sharath!make sure you have mount the right partition.
use “sudo fdisk -l” to find ubuntu partition “sdx,y”
And change this command to”grub-install -root-directory=/mnt /dev/sdx,y”

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Hi, I changed the command to grub-install -root-directory=/mnt /dev/sda5 but the error is the same.
grub-install -root-directory=/mnt /dev/sdx,y

FYI, I am reproducing the fdisk output:
omitting empty partition (5)

Disk /dev/sda: 120.0 GB, 120034123776 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 14593 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x366ed536

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 * 1 2603 20908566 7 HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda2 2604 14593 96309675 f W95 Ext’d (LBA)
/dev/sda3 5207 9076 31085743+ 7 HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda5 2604 4670 16603114+ 83 Linux
/dev/sda6 4671 5206 4305388+ 82 Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/sda7 9077 14593 44315271 7 HPFS/NTFS

Thanks for your help, I really appreciate it.

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admin Reply:
December 4th, 2009 at 10:46 pm

boot up from the ubuntu 9.10 liveusb or livecd
use:
sudo -i
mount /dev/sda5 /mnt
grub-install –root-directory=/mnt/ /dev/sda

this should work.I have tried this several times.

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admin Reply:
December 4th, 2009 at 10:47 pm

There are two “-” before “root-directory” in last command

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Does this work for Ubuntu 8.10 (especially the second method)? If not what should be changed?

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admin Reply:
December 6th, 2009 at 6:09 pm

This should work if you have upgraded to grub2 in ubuntu 8.10,but you need a ubuntu 9.10 livecd/dvd/usb for the second method.

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in the Grub4Dos tutorial for those who got problems booting windows7 after this process, you should run “sudo update-grub” without quotes. and it will fix the problem

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If you use 1st method (grub4dos) after getting back to your Ubuntu distro and reinstalling grub you need to remove “grldr” “grldr.mbr” “boot.ini” & “menu.lst” from your Windows “C:\” partition. If you don’t remove them, trying to boot into Windows will just throw you back into GRUB.

Thanks a lot for guide.
Could you use space after punctuation or use quotes for every file and path (guessing that blog automatically removes spaces) because for example “C:\.Create” fooled me to think that Win7 uses same method to hide files and folders as Linux does -> tried to find “.Create” from “C:\”

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ur mad genius lol….it took me like 10 attempts of all other methods and this method of yourz so simple and worked straight away wow….thank u

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I went from Windows XP to Windows 7 in a dual bot situation with Ubuntu 9.10. After that, the grub boot menu was gone and my Asus 1000H netbook botred directly to Windows.
Number three worked for me as an easy solution. I tried number two first, but without luck. Thanks for this great article!

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DUDE U ARE THE MAN!!! method 2 worked for me!

my situation was like this: i first installed xp and then ubuntu 9.10

so sda1 -> xp
and sda2 -> ubuntu

grub2 bootloader was handling everything and it was working fine until last night when i logged into my xp partition and modified boot.ini to remove the recovery console option(i couldnt stand it! ). on my next reboot, grub2 bootloader was gone and my pc was only booting to xp on without any other options in between. so i tried your method (2) just the first part and it worked like a charm! grub2 bootloader is back!!! million thanks brov!

this is what i used after booting with the live cd:

sudo -i
mount /dev/sda2 /mnt –> my ubuntu partition
grub-install –root-directory=/mnt/ /dev/sda

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thanks dude…. the info given by you really helped me a lot…. i was struggling a lot to restore the grub,and this site came handy for me . thanks once again

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Thanks heaps, I used method 2) live CD and it worked fine after I found the password for root. Live CD kept asking for a password, sudo -i was not working. su works fine.

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Used both the XP and Win7 methods on separate installs of Ubuntu 9.10.

XP method was flawless, except I ended up editing the boot.ini file so only 1 option (Win XP) was available so during boot it would pause to ask if I wanted WinXP or Grub4Dos. I also had to use “sudo update-grub” from ubuntu to get WinXP to boot in correctly.

On the Win7 box I had to “sudo update-grub” and delete “grldr” “grldr.mbr” “boot.ini” & “menu.lst”. After that everything was flawless.

Also initially had a problem with creating the file “C:\.Create” from windows. Eventually found that one out.

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Hi Method 2 worked for me, no problems, many thanks. Phil

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I have a problem with Grub2. Not exactly sure what I did but after a couple of weeks running smooth as class and keeping up with my updates, suddenly when I book, I get the Grub2 list of OSs and if I allow the first option (Lucid Lynx) generic I get dumped to the command line. I try to startX and am told that it is already running but I cannot get to it. If I start in recovery mode it boots fine. I have run update-grub and it completes and creates a new grub.cfg file but it does not fix my problem. Any help appreciated.

jeff
jdorwart@gmail.com

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Windows Vista is good but it can hog your CPU and Memory.`.;

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Hi, thanks for your post. Very useful (for me)

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Brilliant.

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3).Using the cd/usb boot up with grub
Boot up the cd/usb,press c in grub menu.Type:

this stage i got “grub>” but i try

“grub>find /boot/grub/core.img”

that tell to find command not found what is the reason for this

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Will this work also for other Linux distributions? I have CentOs5.3.

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Please consider this method of updating GRUB2:
Fire up a terminal from the Live CD for Ubuntu 10.04.
$ sudo fdisk -l (Note the partition number on which Linux resides)
$ sudo mount /dev/sdaX /mnt (Replace X with the partition number housing Linux)
$ sudo grub-install –root-directory=/mnt/ /dev/sda
$ sudo reboot
$ sudo update-grub

Credits to
http://mundogeek.net/archivos/2009/12/08/recuperar-grub-2/ for the enlightening post &
http://www.webupd8.org/2009/12/how-to-recover-grub2-linux.html for the awesome translation.

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Dude, this totally works! I installed W7 and it wiped out my grub (ubuntu 10.04). I tried the Grub4Dos (cos my live CD didnt worked) and Voilá!

It worked. Thanks a lot dude!

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Strange, it keeps giving me grub2 shell.

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ευχαριστώ , πολύ καλός οδηγός.
thanks dude very useful post

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Download Real player from http://www.real.com/realplayer/linux

After
sudo dpkg -i RealPlayer11GOLD.deb

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admin Reply:
September 27th, 2010 at 3:04 am

Thanks,MS P!

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Hi,

If you have 2 OS on same computer and decide to give up at Linux, follow these steps. Insert a Win 98 CD or a DOS floppy disk in the computer go to C:\ and run fdisk /MBR. After reboot the computer will start automatically in Windows system

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Thanks a lot for the post.
Method second part of the method 2 was exactly what I was looking for

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With SystemRescueCd, at the cd startup:

rescuecd root=auto

then:

grub-install /dev/sda

change rescuecd with rescue64 if 64bit system and sda with the disk letter if different.

http://www.sysresccd.org/

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For those who wish to restore legacy grub after installing windows:

http://linuxtwitter.blogspot.com/2010/11/how-to-restore-dual-boot-after.html

For Ubuntu before version 9.10, it will come with legacy grub instead of grub 2.

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This is an elegant & simple solution, grub-install does the trick. After rebooting into Ubuntu/Linux you will want to run:

sudo update-grub

to re-list any OS installations not detected by grub-install.

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Hi averyone, I have my primary OS windows 7 and I installed ubuntu inside for i may use aircrack-ng,dsniff and some other stuff (i prefer linux for this ).I also installed linux mint (after a while ) just for testing .I’m still going to use ubuntu. The problem is that now my grub bootloader boots only my linux mint(on second boot,of course my windows works fine).I would like to restore my ubuntu sistem becuse i had a lot important things on it.Can anyone help me, i’ve been loking for this but i haven’t found nothing htat may help me.(* in my control panel i have only linux mint, i want ubuntu again but how it was before, i don’t think i have the patience to reinstall everiting again).I know wath i’m asking you may not be the subject of this webside but i didn’t know wath to do. I hope you may help me , thanks

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Thank you! This advice worked very quickly, for me. Saved a lot of time and suffering.

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Many thanks, man!

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Thank you so much, I’v been at this for over an hour and option 2 worked flawlessly! the only thing that gave me an error was unmounting the drives but I said the hell with it and just rebooted and behold i have my Linux back! (oh and I so pose I have windows to…)

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Thanks for a simple straightforward solution to a very common problem. I look for this web page every 6-12 months and I’ll be so bummed if it ever disappears.

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Thank you Sooooooo much. This saved me!

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I can truly say that this (Live CD Instrutions) worked for me. The other on I tried with the chroot didn’t work because I didn’t have the root password. This, for some reason circumvented that issue and delivered as promised. (Once I stopped being lazy and followed the instructions it was a one-shot, no-hassle, 5-minute deal. Just the way I like it …..K.I.S.S.

Thanks much, best wishes to you
Dreian

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I use Ubuntu 10.10 and a recent Win7 install wiped out my grub.
The authors original scenario 2 for Ubuntu9 saved my day.

It did not detect Windows 7 and only had Ubuntu on the Grub menu.

But it got resolved after doing a sudo update-grub after loging into Ubuntu 10

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Your mistaken, your using the old grub. NOT GRUB2. The new grub doesn’t follow the new GRUB2 standards,

timeout 0
default 0
title grub2
find –set-root /boot/grub/core.img
kernel /boot/grub/core.img
boot

is invalid.

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For anyone who said this method doesn’t work, I have try this way and worked well

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Does these steps also work if I had installed Ubuntu using Wubi?

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Please help! This (second instructions) does not work for me! I am running Vista and Jaunty.

ubuntu@ubuntu:~$ sudo -i
root@ubuntu:~# mount /dev/sda7 /mnt
mount: special device /dev/sda7 does not exist
root@ubuntu:~# mount /dev/sda6 /mnt
/dev/sda6 looks like swapspace – not mounted
mount: you must specify the filesystem type

root@ubuntu:~# sudo fdisk -l

Disk /dev/sda: 250.1 GB, 250059350016 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 30401 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x2f994189

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 1 192 1536000 27 Unknown
Partition 1 does not end on cylinder boundary.
/dev/sda2 * 192 14679 116365851 7 HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda3 14680 30401 126286965 5 Extended
/dev/sda5 14680 29757 121114003+ 83 Linux
/dev/sda6 29758 30401 5172898+ 82 Linux swap / Solaris

root@ubuntu:~# mount /dev/sda5
mount: can’t find /dev/sda5 in /etc/fstab or /etc/mtab

What am I doing incorrectly?

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admin Reply:
May 4th, 2011 at 10:12 pm

Your Ubuntu was installed on /dev/sda5. The last command you lost mount point, it should be “mount /dev/sda5 /mnt”.
Finally,run “grub-install –root-directory=/mnt/ /dev/sda” to install grub

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Actually all your steps reference /dev/sda1 when it should be /dev/sda..

Please correct these inconsistencies..
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/RecoveringUbuntuAfterInstallingWindows?action=show&redirect=RestoreGrub

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helppppppppppppppp me!

I tried it on vista and the only message i got is “Missing MBR-helper”

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Cant find “boot up Ubuntu in grub ” from the GRUB4DOS menu, please help

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Hey all you can find the best solution of that problem over here:
http://goo.gl/HXsZv

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Wonderful solution, never found anything as complete as this. Thank you.

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Thank’s,

step #2 works out for me using ubuntu 10.10 dvd.

anyway, i would like to post my problem which has been solved.

i’m installing XP (which likely to be replaced by 7 later)
partitioned the HDD & create a swap & a ext3,
intalling ubuntu 10.10,
recreate ext2 partition,
nstalling Puppy there,
recreate ext3 partition,
installing BT3, and comes out the trouble.

Again,thank’s

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Works like a charm,thank you

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This should be the best result for the search “reintalling grub after installing windows”.
its so easy and simple…Thank you very much..

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Method 2 is extremely easy, fast and effective. I booted from a usb stick which I always keep on hand. Since I don’t have a separate boot partition, I skipped that step. sudo fdisk -l confirmed which drive had my Ubuntu install. Thanks.

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Did not work for me AT ALL.
Installed a new version of Windows 7 on a new partition, which messed up my Grub bootloader, and only let me choose between my current Windows versions. This setup destroyed my boot setup so that no loader whatsoever appeared, the only thing that came on-screen was the HP logo then “ERROR!” in quick succession. If you’ve got a spare CD lying around, take the time to burn yourself the SuperGrub2Disk. It’s quick, it’s easy, and it’ll let you choose what OS to boot from so you can go into your Linux and do the sudo apt-get install grub (or grub2) to get your MBR back in order.

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You can also find a nice post on the below link that worked great

http://opensource-sidh.blogspot.com/2011/06/recover-grub-live-ubuntu-cd.html

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You are a star. It has never been so easy or faster to restore my system. Thanks very much.

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Thnks a lot.This method worked

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