On Fri, Aug 10, 2012 at 03:03:42AM -0400, Brian van den Broek wrote: > On 9 August 2012 12:38, Brian van den Broek > <[email protected]> wrote: > > Hi all, > > > > I am feeling more and more like I've reverted to noobdom and I'm very > > appreciative of all the recent advice/feedback I've got. Let me try > > your collective patience again. Apologies that this is long, but a > > shorter email seems likely to result in requests for more information. > > > <detailed tale of woe snipped> > > > Hi all, > > I had a dreadful day of multiple installs with multiple configurations > of encrypted volumes and LVMs from both the 64bit versions of the > Debian 6.04 XFCE Live CD and the Debian 6.05 LXDE + XFCE CD1, all > resulting in booting to a grub rescue prompt, followed by several > hours of reading and trying to use rescue CD's to restore the mbr > (identi.ca advice suggested corrupted mbr). None of that worked, and > the grub rescue prompt continued to mock me. > > I decided to try one last reinstall, this time with a USB stick with > the debian-wheezy-DI-b1-amd64-netinst.iso, thinking that perhaps the > new installer might fair better. > > My heart sank when I was confronted by a novel grub error. (Sadly, I > didn't write it down. Something like not finding a bootable X for some > value of X.) I rebooted once again not expecting anything to have > changed, but still thinking it good methodology to verify. (Nevermind > the inconsistency with the bad methodology of omitting to write down > the error string.) > > Imagine my utter surprise when I did get a GRUB menu and managed to > boot into Debian. (Then imagine my sorrow for the lost day when I > realized I likely was this trivial step away from finishing it all > hours ago.) > > I can't think straight at the moment and simply cannot imagine why > trying to boot off of a usb stick would give GRUB the smack in the > head it needed. But, it seems it did.
I once had weirdness like that -- when in order for the BIOS to recognise a USB boot I had to hold F2 down during booting or something like that -- even though I had, in the BIOS menu itself, put USB as the first place to look for when booting. Or when temporarily putting my laptop in airplanee mode put i in a state where it no longer recognised it *had* wifi on the next reboot. I didn't even get a menu item to take it our of airplane mode. Who knows? -- hendrik _______________________________________________ mlug mailing list [email protected] https://listes.koumbit.net/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mlug-listserv.mlug.ca
