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So I have this "invalid arch dependent elf magic" error message. I have no idea why it happened. I have a single-drive dell Latitude laptop PC, with an AMD Phenom(tm) 9600B Quad-Core Processor × 4, which has been happily running Ubuntu 16.04 for about a year now. I did recently insert an SSD card to upload some photos but this is a common thing and I certainly removed the card before powering down.

I got good some hints from the thread: How do I resolve a GRUB: “invalid arch independent ELF magic” error? which helped me work out that I need to run a live CD and enter various various commands in a terminal window.

BUT, I'm a complete novice and don't understand a lot of the jargon. For example, the "live CD" I think I should use is my original Ubuntu 14.04 installation CD - is this right ?

Also I'm not sure I know what they mean by "partition table" - where do I find this for my computer?

Would be grateful for any assistance anyone can provide - preferably an "Idiot's step-by-step" guide.

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  • Yes, you can use the medium (CD/DVD or USB drive) you used for installing Ubuntu as live CD. Just boot it and then select "Try Ubuntu without installing" instead of "Install Ubuntu" when you get to these options. You can see an overview of your disks and partitions e.g. using the lsblk command, which you simply type in a terminal. That way you can find out the Linux device name (e.g. /dev/sda2) of the partitions you need to access with the commands from your linked question.
    – Byte Commander
    Jun 22, 2017 at 18:48
  • Brilliantly clear Byte Commander. The lsblk command gives me various sda options: sda1 (294.2G), SDA2 (1K) and SDA5 (3.9G). I guess the one I need to select is SDA1. Right?
    – Mons
    Jun 22, 2017 at 19:04
  • So now I'm looking at a new screen : GNU GRUB version 2.02~beta2-9ubuntu1.7 with the following message "Minimal BASH-like line editing is supported. For the first word, TAB lists possible command completions. Anywhere else TAB lists possible device or file completions... and then the prompt grub> HELP !
    – Mons
    Jun 22, 2017 at 20:03

1 Answer 1

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You must remove delete the Grub boot louder, the easiest way to do that is to use shred command, use a live cd distro like knoppix , do fdisk -l, and then use shred to clean it up.

Example (assuming sda is the disk in question):

# shred -n 1 -vz  /dev/sda

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