Fedora Repair Grub After Windows Installation

How to Repair a Corrupt MBR and boot into Linux. There are times when you inadvertently overwrite your Master Boot Record. The end result being that you are unable to boot into Linux. This is especially true when you are dual booting between windows and Linux OSes. Once when I was working in Windows XP, I accidentally clicked the hibernate button instead of shutdown. And windows somehow overwrote my MBR which housed the GRUB boot loader. At such times, it pays to have this cool tip at hand. Fedora Repair Grub After Windows Installation' title='Fedora Repair Grub After Windows Installation' />This article explains, how to rescue, repair or reinstall a damaged Ubuntu machine which cannot be booted due to the Grub2 boot loader has been compromised. Update 2 If you are looking for a guide to Dual Boot Windows Vista and Mac OSX Leopard, please follow this guide Hack Attack Dual Boot Leopard and Windows Vista. The rEFInd Boot Manager Keeping rEFInd Booting. Roderick W. Smith, rodsmithrodsbooks. Originally written 4242016 last Web page update 10222017. This is what you do to restore the GRUB boot loader when faced with the above problem. First you need a Linux distribution CD. If you are using Fedora Red. This is what you do to restore the GRUB boot loader when faced with the above problem. First you need a Linux distribution CD. If you are using Fedora RedHat then. Fedora Repair Grub After Windows Installation' title='Fedora Repair Grub After Windows Installation' />Hat then the first CD is sufficient. But you may also use any of the live CDs like Knoppix, Ubuntu Live CD and so on. With Fedora CDBoot your computer with the first CD of Fedora in your CD drive You have to enable your PC to boot from the cdrom, which you can set in the BIOS settings. At the installation boot prompt that you get, enter the following command boot linux rescue. Enter. The installer will ask you a few questions like the language you would like to use, the type of keyboard etc. Then, if you have linux previously installed on your machine, the Fedora installer will automatically detect it and mount it in the mntsysimage directory. Once the linux partition is mounted, you are dropped into the command shell prompt. The next step is to make your newly mounted directory the root or parent directory. This you do by running the chroot command as follows chroot mntsysimage Now you are in the shell with respect to the parent directory which is the linux partition on your harddisk. From here, the steps needed depends on which bootloader you are using. You have to have a fair idea what is the device node of your harddisk partition housing your MBR. In most cases, it is devhda if you have an IDE harddisk. But if you have a SCSI harddisk, it will be devsda. Restoring GRUBExecute the following command grub install devhda. GRUB boot loader on to your MBR. And then type exit to reboot the machine. Fedora Repair Grub After Windows Installation' title='Fedora Repair Grub After Windows Installation' />Perhaps you want to run both grub4dos menu. USB drive In the post there is a piece about deleting all the partions during the Windows 10 install After selecting the Windows Upgrade option new install we next. During the Fedora installation I was offered the opportunity to add additional items into the Grub boot menu so I asked it to install an extra item with the label. Fedora Core and Red Hat Linux CD Installation, Version Upgrade, Configuration and Basic Administration. This tutorial covers the installation andor upgrades. Dont bother with Linux, unless you know what youre doing. Windows is the more convenient choice for the majority of users. Practical information for Linux users, and for computer users leaving Windows and going Linux. Now your GRUB boot loader is fixed. Restoring LILOLILO stands for LInux LOader which was the boot loader used before GRUB was developed. It is fairly cryptic and is the default bootloader prior to and in Red. Hat 7. 0. Here you just type the command sbinlilo. MBR. If you dont have a Fedora CD, then you need not despair. You can also repair the boot loader using one of the numerous live CDs available. Using Knoppix CD to repair the boot loader. Here you have to boot into knoppix either GUI mode or text mode. Once you are logged in, fire up a terminal in GUI mode and type the following commands su fdisk l. This will list your hard disk partition information. From the listing, you can know in which partition you have linux installed. Now you have to mount the partition which contains the linux filesystem. For the sake of this discussion, let us assume it is devhda. Now your linux partition is mounted at mnt. Next you have to use the chroot command as follows chroot mntThe rest of the steps are the same as listed above for Restoring GRUB and LILO boot loaders. Update August 0. Many have said when they run the grub install command after following the above steps, they get an error saying that devhda is missing. The most probable reason is that when you chroot to the mount location, it does not have a copy of the device nodes on your machine. Here is a solution for that. If you have installed Linux with boot, usr and in different partitions then the above method may not get the desired results and running the grub install devhda command after running chroot might give the error that there is no devhda. This is because you have mounted only one of the partitions which houses. And the error tells you that it cannot find the device nodes. In this scenario you can do the following Lets say I have Linux installed with in devhda. I boot using a Live CD as described above and then mount the partitions as follows mount t ext. Remember that you are mounting the boot partition into the boot directory inside mnt. Now mount the proc filesystem of your live. CD as follows This is really an optional step mount t proc none mntproc. Finally bind the device nodes build by your live. CD to the mntdev location as follows mount o bind dev mntdev. Now you can chroot to the mnt location and run the grub install command as described above. Please note This updated method is applicable only if you have a Linux installation spread across multiple partitions. If you have installed Linux in a single partition, the first and second step works flawlessly. At least it works for me. Airtel Tower Installation In Bihar. Also Read Dual Booting Windows XP2. Red Hat Fedora Core 2. The r. EFInd Boot Manager Keeping r. EFInd Bootingby Roderick W. Smith, rodsmithrodsbooks. Originally written 42. Web page update. 1. EFInd 0. 1. 1. 2. This Web page is provided free of charge and with no annoying outside ads however, I did take time to prepare it, and Web hosting does cost money. If you find this Web page useful, please consider making a small donation to help keep this site up and running. Thanks Donate 1. Donate 2. Donate 5. Donate 1. Donate 2. Donate another value. This page is part of the documentation for the r. EFInd boot manager. If a Web search has brought you here, you may want to start at the main page. Once youve installed r. EFInd, you may face a new challenge Keeping it set as your default boot manager. Users of multi boot computers have long faced similar challenges, because most OSes provide mechanisms to keep themselves booting, even at the cost of disrupting other OSesor overriding your own choices. On this page, I refer to such unwanted changes as boot coups. Experienced multi booters know the tools and techniques to avoid or recover from boot coups. If youre new to the EFI world, though, most of the techniques you may know for helping with BIOS mode booting dont apply to EFI mode booting. This page describes tools and techniques you can use to keep r. EFInd set as your default boot manager, or at least to recover it as the default boot option if something else takes over. This page is organized by OS, describing the tools and techniques you can use in each OS to recover from a boot coupor in some cases, to prevent one from occurring. I begin and end with information on firmware based tools, though. Chances are you should not read this page straight through instead, peruse the Contents to the left and pick an OS and, perhaps, a recovery tool or technique you wish to pursue and read the relevant section. In most cases, the recovery technique is fairly quick and painless, once you understand how to do it. Note also that, in extreme cases, a full r. EFInd re installation may be required. This will be true if something has completely deleted r. EFInds NVRAM entry. It may also be easier to re run refind install than to learn about esoteric commands such as efibootmgr, bless, or bcdedit. Most EFIs provide their own built in boot managers. These tools are primitive, and in some cases they can be difficult to reach, but they can be useful if you need to bypass a new system default in order to boot an OS that has the tools you need to control the boot process. On Macs, holding the Option key or Alt with a PC keyboard brings up the Macs boot manager. Typically, the Esc key, Enter key, or a function key usually F8 or above does the job on UEFI based PCs. Some computers provide a prompt for what key to use to access the boot menu, but this isnt always true. Sometimes the keyboard is disabled in the early stages of the boot process by defaultpart of a strategy to speed up system boots. Disabling a fast start feature in the firmware may work around this problem. Getting into the firmware can be a challenge on such computers, though. Microsoft provides a way to do this in Windows 8 and later see this How To Geek article for documentation on how to use this feature. If a Linux distribution uses the popular systemd initialization system, you can type systemctl reboot firmware as root or using sudo to do the same from Linux. Once youve found the built in boot manager, youll see its display, which is typically a text mode listing of boot options. On UEFI based PCs, the user interface is typically similar to the one used in years past on BIOS based computers to select the boot device its simply been upgraded to include the descriptions held in NVRAM for specific boot loaders. In fact, prompts are often outdated and misleading as in the below example, they may refer to boot devices, when in fact most of the options are EFI boot loader programs, not hardware devices. As an example, an ASUS P8 H7. Is boot manager looks like this You typically select the option you want to boot by using the arrow keys, then hit the Enter key to boot it. If r. EFInd is working but has been overridden as the default, you can select it or if your preferred OS has its own option, you may be able to launch it directly. Keep in mind, though, that some of the options on the built in boot managers menu may not work, or may work in unexpected ways. For instance, you might see options to boot hard disks in BIOSCSMlegacy mode. These options might not work and even if they do, theyll boot the computer in BIOS mode, so you wont be able to use the tools described on this page to correct your boot problems. The most general, and in some cases the easiest, solution to a boot coup is to re install r. EFInd. If you havent updated r. EFInd in a while, this approach has the advantage of providing an update to r. EFInd assuming you first download the latest version. The Installing r. EFInd page describes how to install r. EFInd from Linux, mac. OS, Windows, or an EFI shell. The refind install script preserves your existing refind. The r. EFInd icons will be updated to the latest versions, but refind install moves the original icons to a backup directory, so you can restore them if youve customized them or if theyve changed and you dont like the new icons. One possible complication to this approach is if youre stuck booting in an unfamiliar OS. In such a case, you may be able to boot into your preferred OS on a one time basis by using your computers built in boot manager, as described in the previous section. The trouble is that how you do this varies greatly from one computer to another. Linuxs primary tool for adjusting the EFI boot order is efibootmgr. If you installed r. EFInd from Linux, chances are you used this tool, even if you dont realize it. The refind install script calls efibootmgr, and this script is called automatically by the r. EFInd RPM and Debian packages. The easiest way to do this is to use the refind mkdefault script. A more complex but flexible approach is to use efibootmgr directly. I also describe some steps you can take to make it less likely that Linux will stage a boot coup to begin with, thus obviating the need to perform a repair. Since version 0. 1. EFInd has shipped with a script called refind mkdefault, which uses efibootmgr to identify r. EFInd and set it as the default first boot option. Use of this script is quite simple Launch it as root or via sudo sudo refind mkdefault. EFInd is not the first boot entry adjusting Setting a boot order of 0. The exact output of the script depends on the current state of the system it might also respond that r. EFInd is already the default boot entry or that it could not identify a r. Ean Font. EFInd entry, for instance. The boot order shown in this example is meaningless by itself its the boot order as identified by efibootmgr for details, see the next section. Instead of using refind mkdefault manually, you might consider running it automatically at every boot or shutdown. You can, for instance, call it from etcrc. Details, however, vary from one distribution to another, so you should consult your distributions documentation for details. If you use it in this way, r. EFInd should correct a boot coup caused by an update to GRUB however, this repair will happen only after a reboot if you call refind mkdefault in a startup script. If you call it from a shutdown script, r.