Recovery of Dual Boot System
I purchased TIH 2011 last month to backup an SSD in my Acer Netbook. The system was a dual-boot of Win7 and Ubuntu (10.10), managed by GRUB. Today I tried to restore the entire system back to a new SSD. When I booted the system, I got a GRUB error and a GRUB rescue prompt. After doing some searches on the forums, it looks like ext4 file systems may not be supported. It is possible that my Linux system and home partitions may have been ext4, but I don't remember. I also don't remember seeing any warnings when I did the backup stating that I was backing up an unsupported filesystem.
Anyway, the most important thing for me to recover is the Win7 partition. It is OK if I need to rebuild Ubuntu from scratch. Is it possible to recover this partion without GRUB, or is there a better way to do this?
YES, I did restore all the partitions at the same time. The ting that concerned me is that when I type "ls" at the grub rescue prompt, it seems like it thinks all the partitions are from msdos, this is what I see:
(hd0) (hd0,msdos7) (hdo,msdos6) (hd0,msdos5) (hd0,msdos2) (hd0,msdos1)
I will do some google searches regarding reinstalling grub. Anything else I should try?
FYI, I just booted a Live CD from Xubuntu 10.10. GParted sees the HD, but it is reporting it as all "unallocated" space, i.e., it doesn't recognize any partitions. I am actually trying to restore the netbook edition of Ubuntu to this HD, but gparted should recognize the partions if they were valid.
I would try that first. This may help.
MudCrab,
Thanks for the advice! Reinstalling grub from the liveCD fixed the problem. The system is now able to boot from both Ubuntu and Win7 without a problem. Much appreciated!
tm