[sf-lug] My NUC computer model NUC5PPYH

[Rick Moen]

Quoting John Strazzarino (jstrazza at yahoo.com):

> At the last meeting, Bobbie tried to fix my dual boot (win/10,
> PCLOS64), but rendered it unbootable.  When booting, it brings you to
> grub rescue.  Uncertain how to proceed..
> 
> When booting from a USB stick with pclos64
> 
> A df command gives this.....
> 
> /dev/root.old 30M mounted on /initrd
> /dev/shm 3.9G mounted on /
> None 3.9Gmounted on /dev
> /dev/sdb1 1.9G mounted on /initrd/cdrom
> /dev/loop0 1.8G mounted on /initrd/loopfs
> None 3.8G mounted on /union
> None 3.9G mounted on /dev/shm
> None 3.9G mounted on /union/bar/run/user/500

Hi, John.  Sorry to hear about the problem.

I notice that PC-Linux OS has defaulted to GRUB2 (as opposed to the very
different GRUB 1.x that is often called 'GRUB Legacy') in releases since
2016, so I infer that you can rely on GRUB2-oriented recovery guides
such at this one:
https://www.howtoforge.com/tutorial/repair-linux-boot-with-grub-rescue/

Not intended as any kind of complaint, but information missing from your
account that makes it more-difficult to assist include:

1.  How your PC-Linux OS filesystems are laid out.  The 'df' output
correctly reports filesystems mounted by the live-booted USB stick, but
those don't appear to include any from your NUC's regular main storage.
Not that this omission is very troublesome, actually.  Probably you have
a small EFI FAT (system) partition, a large NTFS partition for
MS-Windows 10, aanother large ext4 partition for the Linux root
filesystem, and maybe a swap partition, and maybe a Windows 'recovery
partition.

2.  Through what chain of actions (what softare, how configured) your
NUC booted before its booting got broken.  That would be really handy to
know, right now.

Anyway, the above-cited guide is one of many similar ones that may help.



Unsolicited opinion:  Over many years, I can't help noticing that
there's high incidence of broken boot configurations among users who
elect to dual-boot.  An argument can thus be made for avoiding
dual-boot, having a very simple boot setup that you understand, and
leaving it alone.

Where you have a serious need for multiple OSes on a host, using VM
technology (e.g., VirtualBox) is often much more satisfactory than is
dual-booting (given adequate RAM).