Grub Editing – Upgrading From Ubuntu 8.04 To 8.10 – Nvidia Issue – Solved (for me anyway).
Geek Alert!!!
I upgraded from Hardy Heron to Intrepid Ibex and had problems with my video configuration. Previously, I was using the Nvidia driver without any problems at all, but after the upgrade, when I booted into Ibex, I would get the nvidia driver error and would be forced to operate in low res graphic mode. I installed and reinstalled nvidia drivers, first 177, then, since my card is a bit dated, downgrading to 173. Still no luck. I found the solution, and it wasn’t a driver problem after all. I have several Distros running on my computer, and my grub on MBR was point to the boot folder on an older distro, Mint 5 Xfce, and of course, that /boot/menu.lst did not get updated to the new configuration. So I went into grub and rooted the /grub/boot/menu.lst to the correct path on the updated Ubuntu partition (“/boot/grub/stage1” should also work).
When you boot into your grub menu, type “c” to get to the command line.
OK, lets say, like me, you have a bazillion partitions on your hard drives and you don’t remember which one has the correct /boot/grub/menu.lst, type this command to search for the one you want.
- grub> find /boot/grub/menu.lst
Press enter. You’ll get something like this.
- grub> find /boot/grub/menu.lst
(hd0,1)
(hd0,5)
(hd0,6)
(hd0,7)
Well crap! Which one is the right one? At this point, you need to look inside the /boot/grub/menu.lst file to find the most up to date kernel configuration, in this case, Ibex is using the 2.6.27-7 kernel. Lets open each file, starting with the first eligible partition.
- grub> cat (hd0,1)/boot/grub/menu.lst
Make sure there is no space between (hd0,1) and /boot/…
You now can see the boot configuration in this file. The info we are looking for is found where you see this:
## ## End Default Options ##
title Ubuntu 8.10, kernel 2.6.27-7-generic
root (hd1,0)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.27-7-generic root=UUID=630d5f38-97f8-4b30-a650-1bd014770981 ro quiet splash
initrd /boot/initrd.img-2.6.27-7-generic
quiettitle Ubuntu 8.10, kernel 2.6.27-7-generic (recovery mode)
root (hd1,0)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.27-7-generic root=UUID=630d5f38-97f8-4b30-a650-1bd014770981 ro single
initrd /boot/initrd.img-2.6.27-7-generic……
This is the correct /boot/grub/menu.lst file. Mine was on (hd0,4), so I had to look in a few files before I found the right one. Now that we know where the correct menu.lst file is, we need to set grub to point to this file.
- grub> root (hd0,4)
Then, write the information to grub, which in most cases will be installed on your MBR, at (hd0)
- grub> setup (hd0)
Now, to reboot:
- grub> reboot (or exit)
Now you should be booting into the right version of Ubuntu.
Note#1: I had really scrambled my xorg.conf file, and as soon as I reinstalled the Nvidia 173 driver, I have had no problems.
Note # 2: If you have grub installed via Suse or Ubuntu with the fancy splash screen, you’ll lose those graphics. I think that you can restore that by reinstalling grub after you’ve booted into the correct distro, in my case, Ubuntu kernel 2.6.27.
Geek! | Sonicfrog November 4, 2008 | 
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