Any way to fix this downward spiral of a situation?

[frayinq]

what started as trying to get my old linux mint pc set up to play WoW on a road trip quickly turned into the perfect 8 hour example of why i don’t main Linux (no offense). i am now sitting with my laptop stuck on grub rescue and all of my drive partitions unrecognized/wiped, and seemingly no way to create an installation media to save this poor machine

from the beginning, everything was wrong: i tried to use lutris & bottles to get battle.net, but no matter what i could not get it to work. i eventually fell into thinking i had to fix my graphics drivers, and installed the complete wrong ones and screwed up my whole OS lmao. this led to me trying to install ubuntu, except i don’t have a usb stick so i ended up getting the iso working through grub. it launched, and i assumed i was in the clear, but after a bit the installation failed and i was devastated. restarted the pc, tried for a few hours to debug, nothing, and now i’m here.

at this point, i’m more focused on getting this working just as a challenge for myself than actually playing WoW

i tried using ls in grub rescue to check my partitions but they all say Filesystem is unknown. Ubuntu ISO would still be on my drive but honestly that file is probably long gone

if anybody has ANY ideas, please reply. the only thing I can think of is rooting my friend’s android phone and using drivedroid, but i’d rather not do that since it isn’t my phone

 

[KGIII]

What'd you do with the installation media you used to install Linux in the first place?

If you have that, you still have access to the system and the ability to re-install the OS.

 

[Alexzee]

Like our moderator: KGIII said, if you still have the install media (Linux .iso) you can boot that up by USB or CD/DVD.

You said you don't have a usb stick so you got the .iso working by going through Grub.
This is not how you install Linux.

Download the Linux .iso of your choice. If you don't have a usb stick than make a bootable CD/DVD with Ubuntu on it.

 

[GatorsFan]

With BIOS, quickly press and hold the Shift key, which will bring up the GNU GRUB menu. (If you see the Ubuntu logo, you've missed the point where you can enter the GRUB menu.) With UEFI press (perhaps several times) the Escape key to get grub menu.
Select the line which starts with "Advanced options". When the menu comes up select Enable networking once in the shell prompt you can now uninstall those bad drivers - sudo apt remove <driver name> then run sudo dpkg --configure -a then reboot

Also have a look here - https://askubuntu.com/questions/1384994/how-do-i-boot-to-recovery-mode-in-ubuntu-20-04

 

[Alexzee]

With BIOS, quickly press and hold the Shift key, which will bring up the GNU GRUB menu. (If you see the Ubuntu logo, you've missed the point where you can enter the GRUB menu.) With UEFI press (perhaps several times) the Escape key to get grub menu.
Select the line which starts with "Advanced options". When the menu comes up select Enable networking once in the shell prompt you can now uninstall those bad drivers - sudo apt remove <driver name> then run sudo dpkg --configure -a then reboot

Also have a look here - https://askubuntu.com/questions/1384994/how-do-i-boot-to-recovery-mode-in-ubuntu-20-04

I forgot that you can enter Linux this way, thanks GatorsFan.

 

[osprey]

In trying to get a handle on the situation @frayinq, the following thoughts occur.

installation failed

So it seems there is no complete distro installed on the disk, but this may not be the case since you mentioned that you installed ubuntu and you "ended up getting the iso working through grub".

tried using ls in grub rescue to check my partitions but they all say "Filesystem is unknown"

If grub can't see a filesystem, then it can't boot anything.

this led to me trying to install ubuntu, except i don’t have a usb stick so i ended up getting the iso working through grub

This may or may not be promising. Booting ubuntu from grub is expounded upon here:

HOWTO: Boot & Install Ubuntu from the Grub Rescue Prompt

HOWTO: Boot & Install Ubuntu from the Grub Rescue Prompt This guide will detail how to boot an Ubuntu Live CD ISO from the "grub rescue>" prompt. The procedure will also work from the "grub>" prompt for Grub 2 users. I started this thread to help netbook users who are unable to mount the Live...

ubuntuforums.org

Noteworthy are these pre-requisites:

In order for this procedure to work, you must:

    Have an Ubuntu family Live CD ISO image on a partition accessible from the Grub rescue prompt.
    Grub modules from a previous installation must be found and properly loaded.

The procedure will not work for:

    Missing Grub 2 modules (normally in /boot/grub or /usr/lib/grub/i386-pc )
    Corrupted Ubuntu ISO images
    Corrupted partition structure - "ls" returns only "(hd0)"

In your case grub can't see the filesystem, let alone a disk like "hd0", so it's questionable that it's possible to install from grub, if grub is now not seeing a filesystem.

ANY ideas

Here are some considerations:

If you actually have a verified ubuntu .iso file written to a partition on the hard disk, then you could try reinstalling grub on the disk and then see if this newly installed grub can install ubuntu from the .iso file in accordance with the instructions at the above web site.

Without a known good .iso already on the hard drive, one would need some verified installation medium, in this case perhaps a usb with a linux mint or ubuntu .iso on it, and one preferably verifed by having been checked against the checksums. It's very helpful to know that the live disk has been downloaded in intended form, which verification will determine.

With a live usb one can boot it without installing it to inspect the hard drive of the laptop. One mounts the hard drive to a mount point in the live disk and looks around the filesystem to see what's there. If by chance there's a full installation there, then maybe all it needs is a new installation of grub which can be done with the live disk.

Another way to go is to ignore what's on the laptop hard drive and try and install the live disk.

Another alternative way to go is to pre-partition the hard disk using a program like gparted from the live disk, or from the gparted live disk which can be downloaded from the gparted website. When installing the .iso, then the user would choose "manual" or "custom" partitioning and fit the installation on the prearranged partitions. The advantage of doing this is that the pre-partitioning will wipe old partitions and data "litter" on the hard drive which could get in the way of the installer and cause an installation failure.

If you need details about how to go down any of these routes, readers here would be able to help.