Unbreak my boot loader
The stories used to come in, and we’d laugh; stories that were too good to be true. The thieves in Tignish who robbed their local grocery while wearing hockey jackets with names on the sleeve, or the would-be bank withdrawal specialist, who handed over a note (you know, that kind of note) with an identifier on the recto. Giggle, etc. There’s an updated version out today, from Pennsylvania: the housebreaker who paused to check his Face account, and didn’t remember to log out.
Part of the upgrade to W7 last evening involved a disappearing boot record, so that Linux was fenced off from the virtual world. Today was repair time, so after downloading a fresh ISO file, I learned how to make a bootable USB drive. Why? Well, netbooks don’t have optical media support. Some “smart enough to merit a prize” programmer has developed a program that will transfer your ISO, make the needed boot sector and allow access to “the other operating system”. For free, as a plus.
This link will be out of date, eventually, but the program you need is called UNetBootin and the code is available over at Sourceforge. Works like a charm. I now have converted that 1 GB USB drive into something useful. Once I had access to Linux, I logged in, dropped into a terminal window and called up SUDO to get some “power”. Another blog gave the process for restoring your damaged GRUB, and this is also quite easy to do.
Figure out the partition that contains your Linux installation. Call up GRUB. Run Setup and reboot. That’s it, that’s all. Here’s a link to the original (very useful) web page.
