Drive will not boot as expected.

[Guest]

Hi People, I lost a drive 2 weeks ago and had not backed up for 2 months so consequently lost everything I had been working on in that time.
So, new drive, tried the new 16.04. Didn't really like it so I went back to 14.04... I had slower than you could believe Ethernet. Both internet and ethernet on two other computers on the network were fine but mine was .
I finally got it up and running yesterday and downloaded all the programs I needed (and wanted) got the bare bones of an address book from 2 years ago and got my email running.
This is all background to my current problem, I thought, I don’t ever want to go through 2 weeks like that again so I added another older drive to the box and installed 14.04 on that so that I could keep that up to date and swap at a moments notice...

I should have thought of pulling the plug on my new just finished setting up drive but I didn't and now it will not boot into the OS.
All the files are intact, but I guess it's missing something and I have no idea where to start looking or what to do to get it back.
If I unplug the older drive it presents a message that says it doesn't exist and a grub thing that does nothing...
I need help. I'm thinking I need to add a mount point or something but really have no idea how.
Thanks in advance for any help.

[oshunluvr]

Search on re-installing GRUB.

[Guest]

Search on re-installing GRUB.

Thanks for the hint oshunluvr, I loaded a program named "boot-repair" as per it's instructions onto my live USB and all is good.
It didn't even take that long.
If you would like to see the "Pastebin file" let me know.
If you or anyone else can advise me on how to set up my emergency drive successfully, I'm happy to take notes..

[oshunluvr]

Depends on what you mean by "Emergency Drive."

If you mean a bootable USB drive to aid you after a crash and help with data-recovery, SystemRescueCD is a good choice. The best way to recover from GRUB is to have a bootable version of the same OS you're running at the time. You can make your own by installing to a thumb drive, then adding all the recovery tools you want.

If you have two hard drives in your system, make them both bootable (GRUB on both) and have an install on both to boot to.

Don't forget to make a backup of anything you don't want to lose.

[jglen490]

Hi People, I lost a drive 2 weeks ago and had not backed up for 2 months so consequently lost everything I had been working on in that time.
So, new drive, tried the new 16.04. Didn't really like it so I went back to 14.04... I had slower than you could believe Ethernet. Both internet and ethernet on two other computers on the network were fine but mine was .
I finally got it up and running yesterday and downloaded all the programs I needed (and wanted) got the bare bones of an address book from 2 years ago and got my email running.
This is all background to my current problem, I thought, I don’t ever want to go through 2 weeks like that again so I added another older drive to the box and installed 14.04 on that so that I could keep that up to date and swap at a moments notice...

I should have thought of pulling the plug on my new just finished setting up drive but I didn't and now it will not boot into the OS.
All the files are intact, but I guess it's missing something and I have no idea where to start looking or what to do to get it back.
If I unplug the older drive it presents a message that says it doesn't exist and a grub thing that does nothing...
I need help. I'm thinking I need to add a mount point or something but really have no idea how.
Thanks in advance for any help.

Regardless of tips or tricks, from this point on - backup, backup, backup.

My own lesson learned from sloppy habits and a motherboard that bit the dust. Instead of spending time on keeping two distros going, I use two drives in external USB enclosures and rotate a weekly backup. BTW 16.04.1 works wonderfully, after careful training of the beast.