Fixing boot issues on Ubuntu

There are times when something goes wrong with your Grub bootloader. Whatever the reason for breaking up your Grub is, there’s luckily very easy and foolproof way how to restore your bootloader.

Let’s say you have a working Windows OS and decide to dual-boot with Ubuntu (or any of its derivatives like Linux Mint, Elementary OS etc.) and after installing you’re not able to dual-boot anymore (or yet).

In my case, I was experimenting with the new lovely Elementary OS Freya, which came out a while ago. After install, I got stuck just with Elementary, not being able to boot to my existing Windows partition. Luckily, there’s a really easy fix for that.

Boot Repair

Boot-Repair is a simple tool to repair frequent boot issues you may encounter in Ubuntu like when you can’t boot Ubuntu after installing Windows or another Linux distribution, or when you can’t boot Windows after installing Ubuntu, or when GRUB is not displayed anymore, some upgrade breaks GRUB, etc.

Installing this handy tool is as easy as it gets.

If you have a working Ubuntu OS, just open the Terminal and paste in following commands. If not, make yourself a LiveCD/USB, boot it, connect to internet and follow the same steps:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:yannubuntu/boot-repair
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install -y boot-repair && boot-repair

These commands will add PPA for Boot Repair, install and launch it.

Fixing your bootloader

If you have some common problem with your bootloader or you’re not exactly sure what’s wrong, there’s always a fancy Recommended repair button, which will basically reinstall your Grub from scratch, probably solving all the issues which broke it in the first place. Click on the button and follow the on-screen instructions – you’ll be asked to copy-paste some commands into terminal and reboot the OS afterwards. If everything went well, you’ll be able to dual-boot your OSs.

If that failed, launch Boot Repair again, but this time click Create a BootInfo summary and ask for help in your preferred community, IRC or whatever. In case you’re a power-user, there’s also Advanced options with a lot of stuff to tweak & play. You should absolutely know what you’re doing, otherwise you could damage your OS’s even more.

More