Booting Debian 6 with no bootloader, no liveCD, and no bootable partition
Last night I decided to reinstall Debian and cover the old Windows partition completely. I used the executable installer at http://goodbye-microsoft.com to install it. The installation completed, but when I attempted to install grub, it coughed up an error. Then I realized I had no bootable partition. So I went back to the partition configuration step, and the installer froze and I couldn't do anything. So I rebooted the computer and now have no bootable partition and no grub.
I do, however, have some old live CD's of Puppy Linux 4.12 and DSLinux (dunno which version). When I try to make the partition bootable in DSL, it says it can't read the drive. When I try in Puppy, I can view the files on the drive (so I know Debian is installed), but it won't let me just adjust the boot flag either. Is it possible to adjust the boot flag and install grub via the Puppy CD? I can also use PXE to load a bootloader, if that helps. I tried using grldr to boot it, but I'm not sure if that mounted the partition correctly. I'm also not sure if I can boot that way without a boot partition. |
AFAIK you don't need the boot flag on you partition.
No GRUB is more serious. Great that you can boot in something else. Boot Mount the Debian disk below the /mnt directory, for example: Code:
mkdir /mnt/sda1 If Debian consists of more partitions, mount them as well in the directory tree below /mnt/sda1. Now the trick: Code:
chroot /mnt/sda1 While writing I realize your kernel version might not be compatible with the installed Debian version. Recommended is to download a Debian live USB (rescue version), boot from the USB and follow the instructions above. jlinkels |
Debian uses grub2, hopefully the live CD you have uses grub2 also. But probably does not matter. This article has got me out of this bind many a times, look at section 12.
|
All times are GMT -5. The time now is 06:11 AM. |