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I am trying to install Ubuntu 12.10 for quite some time, and passing hurdles one by one. Now I am in a situation as follows.

I have got a PC and 10 GB HDD which will be totally dedicated to Ubuntu so no option of Wubi and dual boot.

I was trying to install from DVD, but it is getting stuck at "Out of frequency" error. So I had to adapt for USB boot option. But my PC is USB non bootable, so workaround is "Plop Boot Manager". So I am doing the installation procedure as follows:

  1. starting from a CD drive which is having plop installed.
  2. opting for for USB boot in plop options.
  3. booting begins from USB.
  4. monitor eventually gives "out of frequency" error
  5. press Shift+Alt+F1 to get the terminal.
  6. open the grub with sudo nano /etc/default/grub.
  7. do necessary changes.
  8. sudo update-grub.

Now here I am getting error as follows:

/usr/sbin/grub-probe:error:failed to get canonical path of /cow.

My system is

P4 3.06 GHz, 1 GB ram , 10 GB HDD without an OS, monitor CRT lg StudioWorks (7 years old). Mobo Mercury P4 266a NDMx (865 equivalent). The whole system is perfectly in working condition under XP, but it is USB non bootable, and all other devices working perfectly.

What should I do next?

11

7 Answers 7

46

After booting from the Ubuntu live CD (tried 14.04 and 16.04) I was able to work around this problem by running update-grub chroot'ed to the grub partition. (Substitute /dev/sda1 below with whatever partition you installed grub on. All commands as root.)

mkdir /mnt/chrootdir
mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/chrootdir
for dir in proc dev sys etc bin sbin var usr lib lib64 tmp; do
    mkdir /mnt/chrootdir/$dir && mount --bind /$dir /mnt/chrootdir/$dir
done
chroot /mnt/chrootdir
grub-install /dev/sda # May not be required
update-grub2
10
  • 2
    Attempting to run mount gives me the error:, NTFS signature is missing. which is odd, because it should be Ext4, not NTFS...
    – Cerin
    Apr 13, 2015 at 3:01
  • 1
    @Cerin, I emphasize /dev/sda1 was the right partition for me, but evidently not for you, if that volume is NTFS. Apr 13, 2015 at 15:55
  • Your solution is confusing. Do you need to run the first part and the second from within the chroot of the first? Or do you throw away everything you did in the first part and only run the second part? Why do you mount both /dev/sda and /dev/sda1?
    – Cerin
    Apr 15, 2015 at 1:18
  • 4
    I followed your instructions and ended up with /usr/sbin/grub-probe: error: failed to get canonical path of '/boot'. I had only my /boot partition on my boot drive, the rest was elsewhere.
    – Sled
    Sep 30, 2015 at 1:13
  • 1
    Had to do an additional grub-install /dev/sda before update-grub, then it worked!
    – kiw
    Jul 7, 2016 at 7:50
27

Find your drive that's supposed to boot with

mount

Or

parted -l

Or

fdisk /dev/sda

And type p to list the partitions, look for type 83.

(If you've got Fedora you might have to use the commands vgs and lvs and if you've got mdraid you might have to cat /proc/mdstat or mdadm -A --scan or insmod raid1 or insmod raid5 and then mdadm -A --scan) and you will use /dev/md0 or /dev/mapper/my-vg instead of /dev/sda

then try mount it

mkdir /mnt
mount /dev/sda1 /mnt
cd /mnt
ls -l

Is this your drive? Cool!

grub-install --recheck --root-directory=/mnt /dev/sda 

(Or whichever /dev drive your root is, with it's mounted path)

grub-install --recheck --root-directory=/mnt /dev/sda --force

(Force it if it doesn't like your partitions.)

Now it should boot into grub, and you can use the grub commands to boot up, after rebooting and selecting the right boot drive from the BIOS Setup, or by pressing ESC, F8 or F12 depending on your BIOS and whether you are quick enough, then at the Grub prompt - you can use tab completion to find it if it's not (hd0,1) but (hd1,3) or something else instead, but beware, tab completion sometimes hangs for a few seconds if grub can't read the filesystem. Once booted into Grub you can try to boot with:

insmod linux
ls
root=(hd0,1)
linux /boot/vmlinuz root=/dev/sda1
initrd /boot/initrd
boot

Or, hopefully you've still got an intact grub.cfg file...

ls
ls (hd0,1)/
ls (hd0,1)/boot
configfile (hd0,1)/boot/grub.cfg

Grub 1 allows you to do the installation from Grub:

install (hd0,1)

Once booted from the correct drive, you can retry update-grub and grub-install. If it still fails, you can try:

grub-mkconfig -o /mnt/boot/grub/grub.cfg

Your paths may differ of course, so just play with these commands until you can see what's where and what's going on.

It might be a sign of imminent hard drive failure at worst, or at best maybe just a partition flag or boot file that got overwritten accidentally, or a deliberately- or accidentally broken installer from another OS.

5
  • 1
    It didn't like my partitions, but -f wasn't working. I had to use --force Jan 7, 2019 at 19:12
  • 1
    to boot from GRUB, on my system I had to change above like so: linux /vmlinuz root=/dev/sda1 (ie the root folder) initrd /boot/initrd.img (ie add .img)
    – Warner
    Jul 24, 2019 at 11:14
  • Still have the "cow" error. Impossible to use mkconfig without getting this cow error.
    – Quidam
    Apr 27, 2020 at 15:07
  • Hello. After installing the grub one need to update it by running: sudo update-grub /dev/sda
    – SAdATT
    Feb 8, 2021 at 12:44
  • In case of /cow error just create with: sudo mkdir /cow And try again
    – SAdATT
    Feb 8, 2021 at 12:45
12

Revised solution based on code above

The solution from above will not work totally without problems because it mounts the boot partition into the / (root) of the file system. That makes grub complain that /boot does not exist, of course. This will fix that problem:

mkdir /mnt/chrootdir
mkdir /mnt/chrootdir/boot
mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/chrootdir/boot
for dir in proc dev sys etc bin sbin var usr lib lib64 tmp; do mkdir /mnt/chrootdir/$dir && mount --bind /$dir /mnt/chrootdir/$dir ; done
chroot /mnt/chrootdir
update-grub2  # inside chroot

As you see i also removed the line breaks so that it is easier to execute for everyone.

Another (simpler) solution

If you keep having problems getting it to work you should look to copy the /boot partition onto the / (root) partition. For that start your system with the Ubuntu live boot dvd and open the terminal. Inside it type:

sudo su
fdisk -l

To find out which partitions you have. In my case sda1 is my /boot partition which is about 250MB large and an sda5 which is about 500GB. I use these values in the commands below:

mkdir /mnt/boot/
mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/boot/

mkdir /mnt/root/
mount /dev/sda5 /mnt/root/

cp -R /mnt/boot/ /mnt/root/boot/

Set the bootable flag for the data partition and remove it for the boot partition:

fdisk /dev/sda
b -> 1 (unset the bootable flag for the first partition)
b -> 5 (set the bootable flag for the fifth partition)
w -> write changes to the MBR

Your computer will now look inside the sda5 for the boot files. Time to do the chrooting again, this time with some required folders needed for grub and which are generated by your Ubuntu live disc already:

mkdir /mnt/chrootdir/
mkdir /mnt/chrootdir/dev/
mkdir /mnt/chrootdir/proc/
mkdir /mnt/chrootdir/sys/

mount /dev/sda5 /mnt/chrootdir/
mount --bind /dev/ /mnt/chrootdir/dev/
mount --bind /proc/ /mnt/chrootdir/proc/
mount --bind /sys/ /mnt/chrootdir/sys/

chroot /mnt/chrootdir/

grub-install /dev/sda

Installation finished. No error reported.

If you do not see a message that the grub.cnf file is generated then also run the update command:

update-grub2 /dev/sda

Now you can safely reboot and see the well known boot menu appear again.

This solution was the only one which was working for me after migrating from a physical server to a virtual machine. I hope someone finds this useful!

4
  • /usr/sbin/grub-mkconfig: 252: /usr/sbin/grub-mkconfig: cannot create /boot/grub/grub.cfg.new: Directory nonexistent
    – Quidam
    Apr 27, 2020 at 15:10
  • 2nd solution: root@ubuntu:/# mkdir /mnt/boot/ mkdir: impossible to create «/mnt/boot/»: No file or folder of this type (It wasn't in English, so it's only roughly translated).
    – Quidam
    Apr 27, 2020 at 15:13
  • It can be that you do not have grub installed as boot loader, then you dont have those files in that location. For your other comment: if you dont have the /mnt folder then create it. It just has to be a folder which you can (mis-)use to mount the disk on.
    – Tim B.
    Apr 28, 2020 at 16:10
  • @Quidam mkdir /mnt first... or mkdir -p /mnt/boot/ to automatically do it... if it still won't try mkdir /tmp... you can put it anywhere, or use an existing unused folder
    – Dagelf
    Jul 23, 2020 at 1:52
1

Got the same error. The only problem was that /cow was still mounted on /.

A little sudo umount /cow did the trick.

1
  • 5
    I get umount: /: target is busy. Because /cow is mounted on /.
    – krubo
    Apr 19, 2020 at 13:23
0

I know, it's a old problem, but I had the same troubles today with the actual version of mint-linux (ubuntu-based). I found a very simply solution! :-) Take off the internet-connection during the first installation. This stop loading of a non compatible grub2. Make the update of all after installation has finished.

1
  • That sounds broken. Hopefully this is no longer a current issue.
    – MarkHu
    Jul 12, 2020 at 1:22
0

I tried all the solutions and couldn't get it fixed. What worked for me - was to install windows 10(it will create EFI partition), then delete every windows partition except EFI and install Linux. This time Linux will successfully and automatically configure grub

2
  • Not a possible answer as this is a 10 year old question and that version of Windows did not even exist.
    – David
    Mar 24, 2023 at 11:53
  • @David, I came across this post, because last week I was installing linux on an 11 year old Dell Optiplex, and I had this error. I spent around 4h trying different solutions from different posts, because regular linux installation couldn't install grub, and grub-install command kept failing. Only managed to get it working when windows installer created EFI partition. When I created it manually from linux installer - it didn't work. Mar 25, 2023 at 14:53
-7

It is the update-grub command which will give you the error when using it from a live cd. I faced with a similar situation when I was doing a GRUB rescue. Also grub-install wasn't in my path for some reason, so I had to run it with /usr/sbin/grub-install.

grub-install accepts a --boot-directory option, to set up GRUB to boot to a system different from the one that is currently running. Here is the relevant manual page.

6
  • No, you have to mount the hard disk and chroot into it, like @green7 said.
    – psusi
    Apr 2, 2014 at 18:27
  • my method also works. try it. its simpler Apr 4, 2014 at 12:32
  • 1
    You don't have a method. /usr/sbin is on the path already so there is no need to cd there. You can't run grub-install and update-grub directly from the live cd ( as you noted ) because it tries to set up grub to boot the current system, which would be the live cd, rather than the os installed on the hard drive.
    – psusi
    Apr 4, 2014 at 14:00
  • This, of course, doesn't work. You get the "can't get cannonical path of /cow" error. And the stuff about cd-ing to /usr/sbin... oh boy.
    – dan3
    Apr 13, 2014 at 12:37
  • 1
    @psusi grub-install accepts a --boot-directory option, to set up GRUB to boot to a system different from the one that is currently running. (Unfortunately this answer does not explain how to use that.) Apr 15, 2015 at 12:30

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