[sf-lug] My NUC computer model NUC5PPYH

[Rick Moen]

Quoting John Strazzarino (jstrazza at yahoo.com):

> Getting back to my NUC computer

Necessary disclaimer:  I've had a long day of outdoors work and so am
really tired, so my endurance is... questionable.


> It now says file ‘/grub2/i386-pc/normal.mod’ not found

Stop, please.  Please prepare to cycle back and collect data afresh.
This time, please take detailed contemporaneous notes.   (If necessary, a
cellphone camera could help.)  If you intend to post diagnostic data to
a mailing list, it needs to include what happened in chronological order

In particular, it's pretty nearly impossible to help, IMO, when the
description is something like "It now says file
‘/grub2/i386-pc/normal.mod’ not found", because that datum is completely
stripped of context.  E.g., you don't say what is happening or what you
are attmpting to do -- or what 'it' refers to.

I'm going to take a guess.  (It's always a bad sign when someone
attempting to help you is obliged to take a guess.  That generally means
your helper is groping in the dark for lack of information, that
information being something only you could provide.)

I'm guessing that the GRUB2 core image loaded at boot time and then
attempted to follow its internal data to find the second-level
processor, normal.mod, that enables 'normal mode', in which filesystem
support and a full GRUB2 script parser are available.  It looked in one
place it thought reasonable, didn't find normal.mod there, and failed
out of 'normal mode' and landed by default into rescue mode.  

Your next task, if that is true, should then be to use the Rescue
Console to find normal.mod and tell GRUB2 to load it from there.  You
would use various core-image commands including 'ls' and 'search.file'
to loaate normal.mod.  (Actually, 'search.file' is not available at the
'grub rescue>' prompt aka Rescue Console, only at the full "grub>'
command line.  But you can still use 'ls' to find stuff, even in Rescue
Console.)

When I say 'use ls', I don't mean just type 'ls' and expect magic to
happen.  'ls' will tell you the contents of something.  Those somethings
presumably contain other things.  You want to delve through those
somethings to find normal.mod.


> Ls command gives (hd0) (hd0,msdos11) and so forth thru (hd0,msdos5), then msdos2 and msdos1

Yes, and?  What did you find when you use 'ls' to examine what those
filesystems contain?  You probably want to do that and find which one has a
'boot' subdirectory.  My guess is that normal.mod is findable at some
location like /boot/grub/i386-pc/normal.mod -- but it could be somewhere
slightly different.  Obviously, I don't know your system.  

All of these things were covered at the one-of-many GRUB2
troubleshooting guides I linked ot upthread
(https://www.howtoforge.com/tutorial/repair-linux-boot-with-grub-rescue/).
Here's another:
https://www.gnu.org/software/grub/manual/grub/html_node/GRUB-only-offers-a-rescue-shell.html



> Tried a bunch of insmod and cat commands but they don’t seem to work

Point:  The description 'doesn't work' doesn't tell helpers anything,
and describing them as just 'a bunch of' makes the description hopeless
to helpers.  Nobody can work with that.  It's too vague.