Friday, September 19, 2014

Permanent Grub Error solution!!!

Todays post isnt exactly security related but rather something important to note among the day to day linux users. Ive had an issue that has bugged me for over a year. Has your computer ever failed to boot and is constantly throwing grub rescue or grub related errors and non of the boot-repair stuff works? Well thats the point of this post because I finally found the answer written somewhere in one of the zillion forums I read when trying to resolve this problem.
My box would sometimes boot up properly and other times not boot up so resorted to never shutting down. After trying a million 'solved' solutions on different forums, I landed on this tutorial that solved the issue. It worked well for a while until I had to update the kernel and the headers. When I tried to solve it with the same method that served me well last time round, well it didn't work this time round so I had to find a more lasting solution. So over the weekend  after about 8 hours I finally landed on this.
Read answer by grief
I did a clean install of my linux mint then when I got to the section of selecting the partition, choose advanced partitioning then I made the /boot the first and primary partition, and I gave it a size of about 500MB. Feel free to choose between 300-500MB depending on the size of your hard drive. Mine is a 1TB then create the partition where the OS installation will go. I set mine to 300GB and set the mount point to /. (All ext4 partitions) I then created a swap partition of 8GB since my RAM is about 8GB. If your RAM is <4GB set the swap to half the RAM. I set the remainder of the partition to NTFS to store my data and all the other stuff. Then proceeded normally with the installation. So there went my weekend.
It so happens that some of the forums say this is only relevant to server versions of linux and not to your desktop versions of Ubuntu or linux mint. I think this comes about because gone are the days when only servers had "large" hard drives. These days its not uncommon to find people with 1,2,4 TB or even bigger hard drives.