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My attempt to upgrade to 12.04 failed, so I burnt a 12.04 CD, and asked to do a full install, getting rid of all previous OS (I had Windows as well as 11.10). All seemed well until the very end when it said it had failed to install GRUB. I tried selecting different partitions to try in, with the same result. I can proceed without installing GRUB, but then it tells me I have to manually install the boot loader. A long Google session has failed to come up with any instructions to do this that I can understand. Help.

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If the answer below works for you, great! If not, it would help to have more info about what your system looks like. Please consider using the Boot-Repair tool to collect & post this info. I tried to outline how to do that here – irrational John Apr 28 '12 at 0:13
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Possible duplicate of How can I repair grub? (How to get Ubuntu back after installing Windows?) – Elder Geek Feb 11 '16 at 17:29
up vote 9 down vote

Nothing about GRUB makes sense to a large number of users. Here's what I'd do.

  1. Boot the machine using a Live CD.

  2. Open a terminal.

  3. Find out the name of the internal disk by using fdisk to look up the device's size.
    For example:

    sudo fdisk -l

  4. Install GRUB boot loader onto the proper disk (the example below assumes it is /dev/sda): 

    grub-install --recheck --no-floppy --root-directory=/ /dev/sda

Hope this helps.

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"Nothing about GRUB makes sense to a large number of users." What is that supposed to mean? If it wouldn't make sense then your solution wouldn't work. It's either the installer (look at the install logs), the partition layout (logs again) or the UEFI implementation (you bought crappy hardware, return it) that is to blame. GRUB is just issued to install to the target and the installer doesn't handle failures gracefully. – LiveWireBT May 12 '14 at 9:14
    
@LiveWireBT I think he just means that Grub is a bit obtuse, especially where most people don't have much experience setting up bootloaders. – wjandrea Sep 13 '17 at 16:52

protected by Community♦ Sep 12 '17 at 19:05

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