Monday, July 31, 2006

Grub may be broken after PBA restore

Windows backups and restores seem to be working well, but Linux restores may not boot up if the boot loader is Grub for reasons that I do not understand yet. Lilo does not appear to be affected. The error you will see is Grub getting stuck on boot. Only "Grub__" will be displayed. The good news is that with version 1.0.1 of the client, you can make your disk bootable by re-installing Grub. Here's how.

After the restore completes, quit out of the PBA client to the console. If you already restored your hard disk, you can boot up the PBA client again, and exit the client to the console. For these instructions, I will assume that your only linux is /dev/hda1 and you do not have a separate partition for /boot. If you have a separate partition /boot, mount it instead of the partition mounted to /.

Run these commands:
# mkdir /root/tmpmnt
# mount /dev/hda1 /root/tmpmnt
# grub-install --root-directory=/root/tmpmnt /dev/hda
# umount /root/tmpmnt
Reboot the system, and eject the PBA client CD to boot from your hard disk.

I will do this automatically in the next release of PBA.

1 comment:

rxhui said...

The fix described has been implemented in PBA 1.0.2.