Hi everyone!

I had installed debian lenny on virtual box, I updated to squeeze following the steps I found in http://www.howtoforge.com/upgrade-de...w-simple-steps . Apparently it didn't do anything in the last step, updating the grub.

After reboot only an error appeared, but it can not start. I find out how to start the virtual machine using damn small linux and how to mount the disc where debian is installed. But now I don't know what to do.

I was ready to reinstall everything again, but if there is something else I can do before that, I would like to give it a try.

Any help will be very appreciated.

Thanks in advance.

DONT!!!!!!!!!!! Now is the time to learn something! You lucky bumm

First of, try to post the error here, that'll help us help you a bit better.

Okay, you can mount the hard drive, cool. Found the small partition the system boots from? I's tiny, some 100 Mb (in my box)...okay, get into that partition, you'll find a folder called "grub", enter it and try to access the file called "menu.lst".
Try to analyse, ever seen this before? Does it look okay to you? If possible, please post that here too, thanks.

Let's try to wake the old horse up!

Some links:
http://boff.wordpress.com/2007/01/17...rub-boot-menu/
(Ubuntu, but that's Debian based...)
http://www.softpanorama.org/Commerci...own/grub.shtml
(more info)
http://www.gnu.org/software/grub/man...2dinstall.html
(quick howto to install Grub)

Lemme know where we get from here!

Thor

Hi there!

Thanks for your encouragement! I checked the menu.lst, and then I also try with menu.lst.old, which I renamed as menu.lst. Finally I read https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Grub2 in which says that grub2 doesn't use menu.lst. I also found what the problem was: At running upgrade-from-grub-legacy, we have to select one of the choices, ... I didn't know how: I tried with TAB, I tried with an asterisks, and finally I tried with ENTER. By pressing "enter" none of the choices were selected and I ended with Error 15, no file found. If I had only knew that I needed to press "space bar" to select one of the options...

I mounted the system on DSL and tried to run again /mnt/hda1/usr/bin/update-grub , and I got:
/mnt/hda1/usr/sbin/grub-mkconfig: line 94: /usr/lib/grub/grub-mkconfig_lib: no such file or directory

Then I tried the chroot command (that was something new for me)
chroot /mnt/hda1/
FATAL: kernerl too old
uname-r
2.4.31

Then I tried again with DSL-N which has kernel 2.6 (I didn't know that), but I got the same result.

Finally I tried with "system rescue cd" (Also new for me), this has many options to boot, and I selected to boot with one of the installed operating systems. And there you go!, I could get Debian again. I had a look again at http://www.howtoforge.com/upgrade-de...w-simple-steps and tried to run some of the commands at the end of the page and finally ran upgrade-from-grub-legacy and selected both options.

Now Debian started again... in console mode with the error:
Failed to start the X server (your graphical interface). It is likely that it is not set up correctly. Would you like to view the X server output to diagnose the problem?

Again... I don't know where to go from here.
But thanks in advance, interesting adventure so far...

Should I mark this thread as Solved, and start a new one with my new problem?

Thanks everyone

Nononononoooooo....the stitchwork continues...

Possibly something like "no screens found"...if so, there is a step-by-step to help you...nonetheless, we're here to help out too, dont worry...

Well, that's Linux for ya! At least (contrary to the "other one") you can get to the plumbing and repair things.

Let's continue the knitwork,okay?

Thor

Hi there!

I found the message "no screens found", then, from http://wiki.debian.org/Xorg , I tried
/etc/init.d/kdm stop
/etc/init.d/gdm stop
/etc/init.d/xdm stop
cd /etc/X11/
Xorg -configure

after that I tried this apt-get install dkms build-essential linux-headers-generic in order to get the virtual box additions,(http://forums.virtualbox.org/viewtopic.php?t=15679) and finally I follow the steps on http://virtualboxes.org/doc/installi...ons-on-debian/

Now I have a new Debian Squeeze running on my Virtual Box, and I'm very happy for that.
Thanks for the advice Thor!

This forum is awesome!

No sweat! Glad I could help!

You aint seen nothin' yet!!!

Thor