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The "oh shit everything is broken, help" thread?

Discussion in 'Technologics' started by AaronSofaer, Feb 20, 2013.

  1. AaronSofaer Magister Mundi Elyscape

    Location:
    Palo Alto, California
    Oh shit, everything is broken, help.

    There is a laptop. It needed to get reformatted and reloaded with full disk encryption + Ubuntu.

    I nuked the partitions from orbit with gparted from a Live CD and reinstalled Linux.

    NOW EVERYTHING IS BROKEN AND EVERYTHING IS HORRIBLE.

    GRUB loads into "grub rescue" but ls only gives me hd0 and hd0,msdos1 and ls fails on both of those with "unknown filesystem" or whatever.

    boot-repair and rescatux utilities both fail. boot-repair doesn't even give me an option to repair and rescatux goes into an unending loop of I/O errors.

    I also posted on the Linux Questions forums but I have NO FAITH WHATSOEVER.
    AaronSofaer, Feb 20, 2013
    #1
    Elyscape and Soli-chan like this.

  2. Griot Despondent Fancybear

    Location:
    Raleigh, NC
    haha linux
    Griot, Feb 20, 2013
    #2
    Elyscape, Lizard_King, Inigima and 3 others like this.

  3. AaronSofaer Magister Mundi Elyscape

    Location:
    Palo Alto, California
    :(

    I'm very stressed and frustrated by this and that's probably why I take your comment so poorly; I probably shouldn't want to dissolve into an angry tirade about how terrible a human being you are.
    AaronSofaer, Feb 20, 2013
    #3
    Elyscape, Soli-chan and Griot like this.

  4. mkozlows Worked The System

    Reinstall from the CD.
    mkozlows, Feb 20, 2013
    #4

  5. AaronSofaer Magister Mundi Elyscape

    Location:
    Palo Alto, California
    Reintsalling again from the CD is about to finish, and this was the first time that GRUB didn't prompt me at all, so I'm tentatively hopeful.
    AaronSofaer, Feb 20, 2013
    #5

  6. AaronSofaer Magister Mundi Elyscape

    Location:
    Palo Alto, California
    After yet another reinstall of Linux (the one after the one I just posted about) suddenly it works.

    I HAVE NO IDEA WHY.
    AaronSofaer, Feb 20, 2013
    #6
    Elyscape, Soli-chan and Griot like this.

  7. Griot Despondent Fancybear

    Location:
    Raleigh, NC
    I'm just giving you shit, and I've been where you are, although mine was just me fucking around, nothing critical to anything. I've still got a Grub boot partition or whatever it's called on my MBP and have no idea how to remove it, but the system often believes that it still has an Arch Linux partition (it doesn't). If I had the hard drive space, I would probably try it again.
    Griot, Feb 20, 2013
    #7
    Elyscape, Lizard_King, Soli-chan and 1 other person like this.

  8. Adekan Beer

    Location:
    Maine
    Computers, man. More mysterious to humankind than magnets are to juggalokind. I've worked on them professionally for 4 years now and I still don't understand them.

    Glad you got it sorted, though. Cheers.
    Adekan, Feb 20, 2013
    #8
    Elyscape and Soli-chan like this.

  9. cnahr Hard Cider Gal

    cnahr, Feb 21, 2013
    #9
    Elyscape, extarbags and Hanzii like this.

  10. dermot Worked The System

    Location:
    Dublin, Ireland
    I went through a similar issue last week. Do you, perchance, have a USB thumb-drive? If so, was that thumb-drive plugged in to the laptop in question when you did the first, borked install?

    If so, then I'll bet you 5 euro-dollars that the kernel decided to install the bootloader on the USB drive instead of your HDD or it installed the bootloader on the correct drive but decided that the root partition was on the USB drive instead of on the HDD.
    dermot, Feb 21, 2013
    #10
    Elyscape and coldcontrol like this.