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I've read a number of posts similar to this one, but they never quite seem to answer what I'm looking for.

I have an Acer computer that had a Windows installation on the second drive (appears as /dev/sdb in gparted). When it become corrupted, I partitioned the drive and installed Ubuntu. When I booted up, one of the boot options was the Windows Recovery option, because apparently Acer uses a recovery partition. I selected it and the installation process began. Unfortunately, because of the partitioning, there wasn't enough space on whatever windows decided the "c:" drive should be. (The first drive is nearly empty, so I'm pretty sure it was a partitioning thing.)

I think what I want to do is install grub2 on a USB drive and point it to the recovery partition, now that I've combined the partitions back into an NTFS formatted partition. (I didn't touch the windows recovery partition, for obvious reasons.)

I followed the instructions at http://www.pendrivelinux.com/install-grub2-on-usb-from-ubuntu-linux/ to install GRUB2 onto a USB drive. I followed what I saw on https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/72378/grub2-boot-into-existing-os-option. I replaced /boot/grub/grub.cfg's contents with the menuentry line listed there exactly as written since the recovery partition is the first partition on the second drive. When I booted the computer to the USB drive, I got a blinking cursor and no menu. I'm not really sure what I should do to get GRUB2 to point to the recovery partition without installing it on the hard drive (as the recovery program seems to think the boot partition is the entirety of the c drive when I do.)

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Have you tried "boot-repair"? Using Ubuntu LiveUSB, open terminal:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:yannubuntu/boot-repair
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install boot-repair

Now, open boot-repair, after scanning systems, don't use 'Recommended Repair' if you want to specify your default boot partition/OS. Choose Advanced Options, then on the Grub Locations tab, you can specify your default OS to boot. Don't forget to "Apply".

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  • Thanks. I'll check it out and report back. As soon as my brain wakes up again. It's like 2 in the morning now.
    – AaronF
    Oct 30, 2015 at 7:45
  • GRUB location is empty.
    – AaronF
    Nov 7, 2015 at 4:58
  • But I was able to use it to set the boot partition using a different part of the same program.
    – AaronF
    Nov 7, 2015 at 5:23

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