For some f***ing idiot reason, I thought I should update my install of Ubuntu whilst on holidays. Of course, the only time I've ever had any problems - it rebooted and just gave me a grub prompt. Everything in my menu.list was gone, completely. After some frantic googling on my iPod I managed to get it working again but my entire menu is now gone and grub-update won't resurrect it properly.

I've got the system in a bootable state now so I'm not that worried but I'd like to have all my f***ing menu options back - I had a bunch of things like Windows XP, XP embedded, Dell Utility partition, etc that are now completely gone.

I've googled and all I'm seeing is people with basically the exact same problem as what I'm having plus a stack of bug reports about it being a bit flaky.

While I can probably manually restore it I really don't want to have to go through all the options myself. It seems weird when I installed Ubuntu grub was able to figure out where everything was and now all of a sudden in can't, so I'm hoping there's some magic option someone else might be aware of.

Have you tried reinstalling grub?

long shot but the upgrade process wouldn't have created a .bak file of your menu list? Would be nice if there was a dpkg-reconfigure grub util but haven't come across anything like that. I've had to do it manually in the past.

Alternatively, you could get an old hdd, remove your primary OS drive (assuming the other OS's a physically on other drives), install ubuntu, copy the grub file it creates, swap back to the original drive and paste.

If you can boot into ubuntu what is stopping you just editing it with all your boot options. I never really got far into my linux but from memory that was something that I could do, and didnt take long...

I may be misunderstanding your situation though

Are you able to boot into linux or XP yet?

If you've got a grub prompt, you should be able to create a boot line that will get you into either OS... have you got that far yet, or do you need help doing that?

Guys it helps to read his actual post, especially the parts:

"I've got the system in a bootable state now"

and

"While I can probably manually restore it I really don't want to have to go through all the options myself."

Anyway the whole bug just sounds retarded. I've read a few things about people also saying update-grub doesn't work that well. Guess instead of starting from scratch you could glue in standard dell laptop entries (from the internets) onto what update-grub manages to produce? At least you wouldn't need to write everything from scratch line-by-line.

Here's a page with an entry for the DellUtility partition and Windows:

http://www.linuxforums.org/forum/installation/113145-ubuntu-fails-load.html

You're right, that does help.

i get this everytime the bios decides to reorder the harddrives (my boot drive isn't sda its like sdc or something, don't ask)

grub needs to understand UUIDs imo.

This would have never happened if you just used Windows!

UBUNTU IS HOMOSEXUAL. JUST LIKE THE ISLAND OF MYKONOS

Hey f*** you buddy. I don't know what your problem is but you should go f*** yourself. You have no right to speak about it like that.

What has the Island of Mykonos done to you?

it gave him aids

Windows boot loader can be just as f***ed to deal with if you run into problems. I'd actually rather deal with grub in that instance.

This would have never happened if you just used Windows!

Correct, instead you'd have endless reboots depending on your hardware.

grub is actually really good if you know how to use it, if it completely fails it drops to a shell which can rescue things. it should still be possible to boot without a menu.lst file though its not overly intuitive.

actually some more googling indicates this might all be blahnanas fault -- most polls with problems seem to be those like me who have an edited menu.lst and blahnana edited mine! The fact that I asked him to is not really relevant.

Also re: backup of menu.lst - yes there is one but it was made after the update had already mauled the file by the looks. Most vexing.

Grub v2 understands uuids. It also does a bunch of other cool stuff. With my patches it's like some sort of little bootloader god.

Mac EFI bootlader ftw.

I think we're criticizing the ubuntu upgrader, not grub. The man page of update-grub clearly states that it only adds/updates entries of the various kernels you have installed.

Like trog says, obviously there's some software in Ubuntu's installer that was able to detect all his windows partitions and add those too, but I dunno what its called or if its even usable outside of the installer.