How to boot from grub shell manually

[doktor5000]

I has copied a Mageia6 hdd to a new hdd with Gparted.
Then I done i switch the orginal hdd to the new hdd.
When I started my Laptop again with the new hdd I got this promt:
GRUB>
asking for a command.
But I have no idea of what command I shall use to boot to Mageia6.
My Laptop is a ThinkPad W701.

[doktor5000]

How did you copy with gparted? gparted is a partitioning tool, not something used to copy stuff around between disks. And what did you copy in particular?

Regarding your question, seems grub has not been installed into the MBR of the new disk or you didn't transfer over the MBR.
You need to boot manually and then install grub into the MBR. For that see e.g.
https://askubuntu.com/questions/929833/ ... -from-grub

[jiml8]

To copy a hard drive and have it be bootable, use dd.

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dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb bs=1M


This assumes your existing hard drive is /dev/sda and your new one is /dev/sdb.

You then will have to look at /etc/fstab and probably fix it up. If your fstab file identifies disks by their UUID (which is the Mageia default...I personally always replace this with recognition by disk label because it is easier) then you will have to either change the UUID of the boot disk in the fstab (and also in the initrd...see "man dracut"... or change the UUID of the new drive to be the same as the old drive.

To change the drive UUID, use tune2fs.

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tuen2fs -U <uuid you want to assign> /dev/sdb1


which assumes that you are still booted from /dev/sda1 and setting up /dev/sdb to be an image of it.

You then could resize partitions as needed using gparted, and when you power down and remove the old drive, the system should boot cleanly into the new drive.

[janpihlgren]

I'm ashamed
I did a big misstake when I wrote the name of the program.
I apologized .
The program I used was Clonezilla-live-2.62-15-amd64

[banjo]

I got into that bind when I screwed up my graphics driver..... and grub was using the graphics menu. It would not boot past the grub> command line. I had to boot the computer without a grub menu so that I could change the grub menu to "text" so that I could boot the computer to fix the graphics driver.... to get the grub menu to boot the computer. Now, when I install a new Mageia, I set the grub menu to "text" to avoid this strange loop.

Anyway, here is what I did to get the computer to boot.

Find out the names of the partitions using the ls command.
Find out the names of the kernels using the ls (boot partition) command.
Manually set the grub variables, root, linux, and initrd...... choosing a kernel from the boot partition.
Issue the boot command

See the example in the image below.

Boot command sequence

BootImage.jpg (212.05 KiB) Viewed 1202 times

That sequence of commands caused a manual boot that failed out of xorg because of the bad graphics driver, but it did boot to a command line. Here is the magic in text.

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grub> ls
(hd0)(hd0,msdos8)(hd0,msdos7)(hd0,msdos6)(hd0,msdos5)(hd0,msdos1)
grub> ls (hd0,msdos7)/boot
.... shows all of the kernels and initrd images ....
grub> set root=(hd0,msdos7)
grub> linux /boot/vmlinuz-4.19.12-desktop-2.mga7
grub> initrd /boot/initrd-4.19.12-desktop-2.mga7.img
grub> boot


Since I installed Mageia 7 root directory on sda7 (msdos7) that is the one that I booted from. I have two systems installed on that disk, which is why the root directory was not sda1 (msdos1). If I had booted from msdos7 I would have booted Mageia 6.

I had to do a Ctrl-Alt-F5 to get it to show the command line login after booting.
Log in as root. At that point it is possible to edit the boot parameters etc. to try to fix the problem. The editor vim works OK in the console.

Banjo
(_)=='=~