David B. wrote:
On 10/01/2019 03:16, Bill in Co wrote:
[....]
I just had some concerns, as echoed above, and was just looking for some
specific feedback regarding those questions or concerns. :-)
As far as "upgrading" is concerned, I think my stuff is too old for that.
I've got one desktop computer (Win XP), which I use almost all the
time. And
just as a backup, I have two old used eBay laptops (one with Win XP, one
with Windows 7), which I rarely use..
If I ever went out and bought one of these nice new svelte laptops, like
I've seen on display at some stores here, I'd probably just scrap the
latter
two.
I wonder if anybody gets so used to a laptop that it ends up replacing
their
desktop for almost everything they need to do (for home or limited
work use,
I mean).
What you might like to consider, Bill, is a brand new iPad Pro and
detachable keyboard.
After many years of persuasion I got one for my sister about 14 months
ago (she's just passed her 82nd birthday!). She had NEVER used a
computer of any sort nor ever used a Smartphone. She's taken to it like
a duck to water! I'm an hours drive away from her but have been in touch
regularly to provide a kind of help-desk facility free of charge! ;-)
If you have an Apple store near you, I encourage you to visit to ask for
a demonstration and hold the magic in your hands!
You might enjoy watching this video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jzHHxlpOaw8
=
Things for me are not always straight-forward! :-(
I'm now faced with a problem set out here (following the recent update
of my Windows 10 laptop)
Now I'm getting:
error: unknown filesystem.
grub rescue
https://askubuntu.com/questions/1195...own-filesystem
Perhaps Paul can recommend HIS preferred solution?
You've got the discussion thread to work with.
A classical repair involves the three line stanza before
this, plus this command. That's called "chroot from a LiveCD",
and is a way to fool the software processes that follow it,
into thinking they are running "native" on the hard drive OS.
So while the DVD-sourced OS is what boots the machine,
once you change the root of the file system from / to
/media/ubuntu, then you can issue commands as if you
were issuing them from a properly running Ubuntu HDD OS.
sudo chroot /media/ubuntu/
sudo grub-install /dev/sdx
But in that discussion thread, I don't see any signs that
anyone bothered to "survey" the disk setup and figure out
what's wrong with it. The poster in that thread seems to
still have trouble after a proposed fix, and that suggests
there's something we cannot see which is actively interfering
with things.
A typical situation would be, a user has more than one
hard drive, and has inadvertently installed some boot
materials (a GRUB stage), onto the wrong hard drive.
And then, by following these simplified instructions that
assume a single disk drive, the solution doesn't seem to work.
So first you have to take a look at the disk setup (in
the equivalent of Disk Management), and make sure you
know exactly what the nature of the problem is, before
just dumping a canonical solution on it.
The "Boot Repair" CD is fine, but what we don't know is
how many variations of repair are programmed into that tool.
I wasn't convinced it knew how to fix a GPT setup for example.
Especially one where perhaps the BIOS was partly responsible
for breakage.
So the first step is understanding the setup, then you run
off and try and find a matching solution. The askubuntu thread
you picked isn't bad, and suggests several common ways of
fixing it. But what of the original setup ? Kosher or what ?
I can't tell from here. And the thing is, characterization
from Ubuntu takes multiple tools. I can't just give you
gnome-disks or sudo fdisk or sudo gdisk or sudo gparted
and develop a complete picture that way.
I believe there is a tool which "visualizes" the various
boot stages of Linux, and can tell if something there matches
an expected pattern or is broken. Now, what keyword is going
to tell me the name of that program :-/ This is the part
I hate, remembering there's a capability but not
remembering the name :-/ It's possible Boot-Repair uses
that utility.
I only got the Boot-Repair CD about a month ago.
It seems the utility is called "Boot-Info".
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Boot-Info
In this example, Debian has two partitions. sda1 is the slash.
sda2 is a declaration of an Extended, and sda5 is swap being
stored in the Extended area as a Logical. So that's an example
of a pretty simple setup, something that Boot-Repair should
not have a problem with.
https://i.postimg.cc/3wBFwHzd/bootinfo.gif
If you have more than one disk, the report should reference
sda and sdb if there were two disks.
The text file can be uploaded to pastebin but I don't
recommend doing that without cleaning the file first.
Maybe Boot-Repair supports Windows File Sharing, but
I didn't test. It's also possible you could store the
text file on a USB stick as an intermediary.
Paul