I am running a dual boot system with windows 10 & Debian 9 Stretch on the vintage 2010 Dell XPS M1730. I was cloning the Win-10 partition to an external drive using minitool partition wizard pro. Due to the large size of the partition [675GB] i resized it before copying it. The cloning process worked fine, until i rebooted. Grub could not find the MBR and went into rescue mode. I have several boot utilities inc: G-parted, runtime-live and Soper-Grub2 [which i ultimately ended up using to rebuild the winows-10 MBR which has gotten me back into widows only]. I am still relatively new to the Linux/Debian world and have a very limited command language skills. I am especially illterate with Grub or boot loaders in general. when this problem has occured before i was forced to reinstall Debian to obtain accres to either OS. but i have spent months fine tuning the latest installation and really would like to learn how to help grub find the boot file and fix the problem without starting over again. i also have a really special software tool called Bootice which I know could fix the problem if i only knew how to use it. Thank you in advance for taking your time to help me.

I don't see how cloning a partition with an OS on it from one drive to a second drive is going to have any effect on booting systems on the original drive. Are you trying to boot the original drive with the original windows and Debian or are you having problems booting the cloned system?

Reinstalling Grub is fairly easy and this should be fixable from a live cd. Basically the steps boil down to
1) Boot from live cd
2) Reinstall Grub

If you have the original installation medium for Debian, I'd suggest using that

If you got to grub rescue mode, the initial grub code (in the MBR) was launched. Seems we are not being told the entire story.
- did you reboot after resizing to ensure that was ok ?.
- did you move the Linux partition ?.
- did you allow minitool to embed any of its "advanced features" ?.

A simple re-install of grub as above should fix the boot problem. As to whether it's "URGENT" ...

That's your answer. He screwed with the partitions.

I would not trust any spyware 95 based binary to work as it should.

Depending on which grub we are talking about, we could ask on which stage grub hangs, and than we can look up where grub is.

as said redo the bootloader. Every distro does this differently. E.g. gentoo handbook, section installing the bootloader or what it is called.
I suggest using sysrescue-cd.

Hint gparted livecd worked quite well in teh past for several years and is quite proven here. I would not trust any acronis true image or other spyware95 based software.

a spyware 95 approach which is very bad in several aspects.

Just fix the bootloader is the suggested approach.

It's like you buy a new car because you need new pair of wheels.

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tools needed to get any linux running again, assuming it is grub 1 or grub 2.

sysrescue-cd
nano (or any other suitable texteditor)
grub package for your architecture which sysrescue-cd provides
kernel & intiramfs from your distro in question
gparted (for laziness which sysrescue-cd provides) (of course you can use the command line tools also ...)

gentoo and arch linux wiki / handbook have decent docs about grub

Boot the debian install CD. Choose 'rescue'. Open a root shell in the root directory of the Debian installation. Then do .

Hi,

Yea, you obviously wiped your grub somehow.

I believe it would be the same as ubuntu boot off your live cd, run
grub-install /dev/sdX