Ytdyklly

I cannot boot into Ubuntu as everytime I click on grub, it boots me into a shell type command prompt window. I do not know which commands to type. However, on pressing TAB, it suggests a list of commands that the "grub2 shell" can take. When I type, load_env it returns /boot/grub/grubenv not found. Please help.

It looks like your linux installation is not complete or somewhat broken.

Possibly you have everything except appropriate boot commands installed, in which case you can try manually locate your appropriate vmlinuz-xxx, initrd-xxx files, load them into memory with linux and initrd commands, and boot with boot.

For reference, check out available commands at http://www.gnu.org/software/grub/manual/grub.html#Commands and try to locate your original grub.cfg with ls, and look into it with cat command to find out what options you have to append to linux command after vmlinuz-xxx filename.

• Hint: set pager=1 helps you to use cat with long text files.


• Hint2: files on other partitions can be referred as (hd0,msdos2)/dir/file, changing 0 and 2 to appropriate disk and partition number. Tab expansion is useful there, too.

A detailed file-by-file investigation could probably fix this problem with precision. That requires a great deal of expertise, though. Running the Boot Info Script, posting the RESULTS.txt file to a pastebin site, and posting the URL to your document here can get you started down this path; however, this will be a tedious process and there's no guarantee you'll find a solution.

Three other relatively easy options come to mind:

• Re-install Ubuntu and hope that whatever created the problem doesn't recur. This is a reasonable course of action if this is a fresh install; however, if you'd previously been booting and it's suddenly failed, you presumably have personal data files that you don't want to risk in this way. (It's possible to re-install without damaging your personal files, but there are too many ways in which this can go wrong for me to blithely suggest that you attempt it.)


• Run the Boot Repair tool on your computer. This tool analyzes your installation and attempts to repair Ubuntu boot problems automatically. It often succeeds, but its success rate is not 100%. If you can't boot at all right now, it's unlikely you'll make matters worse; but if you can boot another OS in some way, there's a slim chance that Boot Repair will interfere with that boot.


• You've included the UEFI tag. If you're booting via EFI, or even if you've got an EFI firmware but are booting in BIOS/CSM/legacy mode, you can download and prepare the CD-R or USB flash drive version of my rEFInd boot manager. If Secure Boot is disabled, you should then be able to boot rEFInd, and it should enable you to start Ubuntu. You can then either attempt to repair your GRUB installation (by re-installing the GRUB package, doing a sudo update-grub, or otherwise analyzing and fixing the problem) or install the rEFInd PPA or Debian package to bypass GRUB and its current problem and use rEFInd instead. This approach is unlikely to create new problems, since it involves making no changes to your hard disk until you've already successfully booted Ubuntu; but it applies only to EFI-based computers, and even then there are a number of situations in which it won't work.

None of these approaches is guaranteed to work, but there's a good chance that one of them will help you out.