Category: computer

At work I requested a new portable drive to which I can backup my notebook’s files – backups are always a good idea. After looking up the available models I opted for a small 500GB SSD from Korean maker (and market leader) Samsung, the T5. And it’s tiny as you can see:

And yesterday I installed Debian 10 “Buster” onto it, making use of encryption – I changed that again today since my notebook refused to even “see” it as a vaild and connected USB device, so I reformatted it at work and also made my first backup.

This installing of Debian at my home machine had consequences tho – I somehow managed (like with the latest Windows 10 update as well) to corrupt my grub-efi boot sector so that I was able to still boot into Windows, but not into Linux, my main work system (I keep Windows only for the Olympus and some free (giveaway) music programs, but almost never use these).

So in case you should end up with that

grub>

boot sector message instead of a menu with options to boot one day, here’s what you can do.

First, don’t panic! Your system isn’t severely damaged, and everything can be repaired quite easily. If you want to make sure that everything is still where it belongs, try this:

grub> ls

will give you a list of hard drives and partitions, depending on what is installed in your system. In mine, I have two physical hard drives, the first one with several partitions (like EFI, Windows, Linux, and so on), the second and much bigger one is only for my /home directory. So these are easy to identify. I also know that my Linux system is on partition 6 (in the following, the variable ‘y’ represents it) of hard disk 1 (in the following, the variable ‘x’ stands for that one). So type in the following lines, setting the disk number instead of ‘x’ and the partition number instead of ‘y’:

grub> set root=(hdx,y)
grub> set prefix=(hdx,y)/boot/grub
grub> insmod normal
grub> normal

At this point, you should see something like your normal grub menu from which you can start your system.

Once in it, you can’t repair it from here tho – you need to start it another way to do that, using your installation media (in my case, this was a USB stick) which itself is EFI-formatted, and using a GPT instead of the old legacy MBR boot sector. So don’t throw away that CD or DVD after installation, or make a new USB startup disk with Debian Live on it. You might have to press some keys during startup to get your BIOS to boot from that one, make sure to use it in GPT (EFI) boot mode.

Once that image is up, the by far best and easiest description I have found to go on is the one on askubuntu.com. You may need some program (they mention gparted which isn’t available on a Debian Live image, but another program called ‘disks’ is) to again identify your partitions and device identifiers, which they describe with ‘x’es in the following.

The highest rated of the current 7 answers (with 48 votes as I write this) is the one which works flawlessly. Here it is:

Reinstall the GRUB boot loader to your Ubuntu installation in EFI mode this way …
Boot from the Ubuntu installation medium and select ‘Try Ubuntu without installing’.
(Boot your install medium in EFI mode, select the Ubuntu entry with UEFI in front.)
Once you are on the Live desktop, open a terminal and execute these commands :

sudo mount /dev/sdXXX /mnt
sudo mount /dev/sdXX /mnt/boot/efi
for i in /dev /dev/pts /proc /sys /run; do sudo mount -B $i /mnt$i; done
sudo chroot /mnt
grub-install /dev/sdX
update-grub

Note : sdX = disk | sdXX = efi partition | sdXXX = system partition
To identify the partitions use GParted, the tool is included in the installation medium.
After having run the commands GRUB will be installed in the separate EFI partition.

And that should be it – this solution from user ‘cl-netbox‘ works as described. So should you ever need this, please go and thank him (or her) instead of me.

So I’m typing this from my repaired system. Life is great.

As always, thanks for reading.

So the Debian developers upgraded each and every image from ‘testing’ to ‘stable’ by now, or from ‘Stretch’ to ‘Buster’ to stay with their names. I tried the method of writing such a Debian Live image to my USB stick like mentioned in https://www.debian.org/CD/faq/#write-usb – and it worked. Booted it and selected localization support, and boom – I have German:

In fact I am writing this from Debian Live right now, and so the first thing I learned is that the keyboard is still English. Or American. But a quick and simple reconfiguration – without logoff or anything – changed that:

It even has a very cool picture of the keyboard:

So you could work like this if it has to be (like on a machine borrowed from someone else). Very good job, in fact this is excellence again. Learning new things each minute I’m spending with this. And of course you can still access your local drive(s) if you have any, or install Debian from within this Live image – very cool.

Ok, more about this later…

First I didn’t want to do it right away, but then I decided to just upgrade my machine to Debian 10 aka “Buster” (named after a character in Toy Story as always) today. So welcome Buster:

For those of you who maybe have never done anything like this, you should probably read the chapter about upgrading in its handbook. For me, expecting nothing but excellence from my favourite free software team, I just updated my /etc/apt/sources.list, followed by a ‘sudo apt update’ and ‘sudo apt upgrade’ – and that was it.

Now I have to check what has changed. Of course Gnome and about every other software package is different from before, and of course Wayland looks and feels a bit different from X.Org – but time will tell.

So a big thank you goes to the Debian developers!

Over at home I’m slowly running into disk space problems – our machines all have 2TB drives for our /home directories, the NAS has two mirrored ones. And for me doing lots of photography since 2009, and music since about two years, and now videos of others making music, I was slowly approaching limits (I have about 1.6TB occupied).

So I checked prices, and SSDs are still a bit too expensive in these sizes – I have a 256GB SSD for the operating systems (Debian Linux and Windows 10), but as a replacement for my 2TB Seagate Barracuda I ordered a 4TB WD Red hard drive which is in the Top Ten of the most searched drives on Geizhals, and which is affordable (got mine for under 100€ including shipping), and according to the guys over at Heise, also nice and cool and silent enough to be built into a typical desktop PC.

It arrived yesterday, so I already formatted it with GPT (instead of MBR which is legacy and which can’t address more than 2TB), and during the night I copied everything from my Barracuda to the new Red drive (a simple one-liner under Linux, easy and reliable as always).

What still has to be done is to mount this as the new /home so that I can take out the old 2TB drive. And there’s a nice article about how to do this with a simple change of entries in the /etc/fstab file over at Linuxconfig.org, just in case you never thought about this. Easy as everything on Linux, let’s see what Windows will think about this new drive 😉

On another note, this upcoming Saturday is the planned release day for the next version of Debian Linux, which will have the name “Buster”. Release parties are planned all over the world already, but I’ll only have a short look and install it on my USB drive first – upcoming holidays, so further changes to my machine(s) have to wait until we’ll be back from a short vacation.

As always, thanks for reading. And if you want more tips like this one with the change of /etc/fstab, consider bookmarking of LXer.com where I find articles like the one mentioned above all of the time. Oh, and in the sense of a full disclosure: I’m still a member of the team over there…

As always, thanks for reading.