Specialization is for Insects

Seriously, Grub is a boot to the head.

I rarely shut down my computer.  It’s linux, and is pretty low powered, so I don’t really have to.  Last night I did shut down my machine before I went to bed. I had been playing with and cleaning up my grub config last night.

For those of you who are new to Linux/Ubuntu Grub is the program that allows your computer to boot.  It’s pretty important. And I broke mine

And it turns out that it’s pretty hard to fix grub when you can’t boot your computer far enough to manipulate the grub configuration files.  There is a simple built in command line, but it’s pretty difficult to wrangle things in.

find /boot/v <–tab–>

The above command actually gives you a lot of really useful feed back, both in the tab completion and the result.  It *should* spit out something like (hd0,5) which equates to hda5.  My entry in my /boot/grub/menu.lst had (hd1,5) instead of (hd0,5).  And that’s what prevented me from booting.

Luckily I had a livecd handy to get online and diagnose and find that find / command.

So don’t touch grub unless you read up on the matter first.  Seriously.  It will kick you in the head.  With a boot…