Hi

I do consider myself a newbie only because In know enough to get myself into trouble.

On my desktop I have/had Fedora 38 and Ubuntu 24 as a dual boot. For my needs Ubuntu isn't working so I tried changing partitions so I could increase the size of Fedora. Perhaps later installing another distribution to replace Ubuntu. I used Gpart and made a mess I fear.

When I reboot I get only "GRUB:". The keyboard doesn't seem to work and I am really stuck.

I am on my laptop now running Debian 12.

Hope someone can help?


Bog

Exceeding vague, and you expect a specific response ?. Hmmmm.

Did you only change partitions, or did you delete some ?.Did you expand the Fedora partition(s) to utilise the space freed by the above action(s).
Do you still have the Fedora USB you installed from ?. If so your best bet is to go here and follow the appropriate commands. Saves us having to guess if you're btrfs/ext4, LVM, LUKS, ...

Sounds like a re install will be quickest way to get back up & running, make sure to back up any important data to an external drive, via a 'live' pendrive, if necessary, before doing the re installation.

Go here https://sourceforge.net/projects/boot-repair-cd/files/ download the iso put on usb, create a boot-info file and post.

I am sorry to be too vague. Normally I am to long winded.

The desktop originally had Windows 11 Pro. I dual booted with Fedora and Ubuntu. Ubuntu was the first distro I put on followed by Fedora. I tried moving partitions around and when that didn't work I formatted the Ubuntu partition. This was the wrong thing to do.

I was trying to get rid of Ubuntu because for my needs it didn't work well while Fedora does all that I need. Nothing against Ubuntu. I would much prefer the entire drive formatted with Fedora.

I am not sure what I did but when I sat up the dual boot I could still boot from a USB drive. Once everything was installed that went away, mostly because I had no reason to have the USB drive boot. I really don't think I changed the BIOS but it is possible.

I know I must seem the complete idiot, but I really a have a few brain cells left. I am 71 years old and while I was in the army I wrote routines in COBALT, FORTRAN, compiled EXE files from dBASE III Plus, PASCAL and MS-DOS basic. The first computer I ever saw was a 64kb machine which was a 2 stories building and only had punch cards. So please cut the old man a little slack. LOL!

Downloading it now. Thank you!


Bog

I think the normal thing to do is to boot Fedora.
Open Gparted and delete the Ubuntu OS on it's partition.
But while still in your Fedora OS - I think we're then supposed to use os-prober and:
on the terminal.

You see after you remove your Ubuntu OS (in Gparted) - you need to stay in Fedora.
Then you need to tell GRUB that Ubuntu isn't there anymore - while still being your in Fedora OS!
That's the thing.

1. So after deleting Ubuntu in Gparted - you need to close Gparted.
2. Then you need to open a terminal as root and input 'update-grub'.
Only after that can you re-boot. [/QUOTE]

[/QUOTE]

Sounds like an excellent plan, however, I can not boot off of the USB drive. I made a boot disk on my Debian machine and when that didn't work I used my wife's Windows machine with Rufus to make a second boot disk. Still not booting off the USB drive. I tried holding ESC which use to take me to BIOS. That isn't working either. I don't suppose there is anything I can do, I am looking at GRUB on the screen.

I forgot to add. When I turn the power on the first thing I come to is a Security Password which I have always had there. I can enter the password from the keyboard, press ENTER, then GRUB. No more keyboard action accept CTR-ALT-DEL will reboot.


Bog

Did you download the 64bit or 32bit iso? If this is a uefi system you may need to disable secure boot

My older ubuntu was showing, though not my newer installed version... adding to my issues, BTW was my failing to recall that Ubuntu had blocked os-prober...


So for others:

https://askubuntu.com/questions/1410...s-isnt-showing


My thanks to ArrayBolt3 on askubuntu for his notation
which is here:


https://www.linuxquestions.org/quest...0/#post6455357





,

If you want to attempt to recover from the grub prompt there are several good tutorials on the web
“How to recover from grub prompt”
Fedora grub files are in /boot/grub2 whereas ubuntu are in /boot/grub

Yes I did. I made 2 copies of a USB drive from 2 different machines. I can't get the desktop to boot any USB or so it seems.


Bog

My wife has been researching but I will help her. Thanks to all of you for your very kind advice!

OK, I pressed CTR-ALT-DEL followed by pressing F12. This brought up the USB boot recovery disk. Trying to figure out how to connect to the Internet.



Bog

Something you can try at the grub prompt
or

The GRUB error is gone. The way I did it was with the boot repair iso. After trial and error I went to the very bottom selection which was "Enter SetUp". This took me to bios and I checked to insure I could boot from a USB drive, saved my work and then boot repair kicked in. The software claimed success. When I rebooted I got a different error. The computer is looking for a OS. That must be because Fedora wasn't originally bootable? I am really leary of using Gpart again as this got me into trouble before. I'm going to try and install Kali with as little space as possible. If that doesn't work then I am off to the races with Gpart. Perhaps someone would be kind enough to educate me???


Bog