The other day, I got sick of having to close the update to 8.1 reminder every time I booted in Windows. So instead of doing the smart thing like ignoring it, or finding a way to stop the reminders, I hit update.
No backups, no nothing prepared. Silly me.
My setup was Debian Wheezy dual booted with Windows 8.
When I finished the update, grub no longer loaded to boot into Debian as my first option.
Instead I had to manually select it in the boot loader.
What greeted me was grub rescue.
As a noob with os/linux/terminal related things.. I went and googled.
I found my Debain Wheezy disk, and tried to go through the graphical recovery, mostly following the steps here: http://azerdark.wordpress.com/2010/01/24/restoring-grub-in-debian/
However at the installing grub step, it didn't seem to do anything. There were no error messages, but at the same time, on reboot, there was no difference.
So I gave up on the disk, and tried restoring through grub rescue.
Mostly followed a mix of the instructions here:
http://unix.stackexchange.com/a/148042
http://askubuntu.com/questions/119597/grub-rescue-error-unknown-filesystem
<grub rescue> set root=(hd0,gpt7)/boot
<grub rescue> set prefix=(hd0,gpt7)/boot/grub
<grub rescue> insmod linux
<grub rescue> linux (hd0,gpt7)/boot/vmlinuz-3.2.0-4-amd64 root=/dev/sda7
<grub rescue> initrd (hd0,gpt7)/boot/initrd.img-3.2.0-4-amd64
<grub rescue> boot
I manged to boot into my debian (phew), at which point, I first went to commit and push my code to my repo. haha. and then
sudo grub-install
sudo update-grub
and yay it was fixed. I feel like I just combined 3 hours of stress into an easy few steps.
On another note. My laptop is a Lenovo z400. I'm not sure at which step and how (potentially when installing updated drivers), but at some point in time, my UEFI security boot was changed from disabled to enabled. And I spent another couple of hours debugging why my debian was not loading again. I so fail.
