Ubuntu showing GRUB console when trying to boot?

Question

I have a dual-installed Ubuntu and Windows 7 on my machine. Since a few days ago, whenever I try to boot into Ubuntu, the GRUB Console shows (this has never happened before). IfI type: "boot" it says: "no kernel loaded."

What can this be?

Thank you.

Answer 1

I can suggest here two additional repairs:

A) To expand on the reply from mjgpy3, it is possible that your grub MBR has been corrupted. If his solution doesn't help you can actually reinstall the grub. To do that:

1. Boot with Ubuntu Live CD

2. Open terminal (command prompt)

3. Type: sudo fdisk -l

   You will get a list of partitions, similar to the following list:

   /dev/sda1 13 102400 de Dell Utility  
   /dev/sda2 * 13 1926 15360000 7 HPFS/NTFS  
   /dev/sda3 1926 30892 232676566 7 HPFS/NTFS  
   /dev/sda4 30893 60802 240245761 5 Extended  
   /dev/sda5 30893 59584 230467584 83 Linux  
   /dev/sda6 59585 60802 9777152 82 Linux swap / Solaris  
   

   Ubuntu partition is the one with the name "Linux" (not necessarily the one with the star, although could be). On this case is on '/dev/sda5' so we have to mount it:

4. sudo mount /dev/sda5 /mnt (replace 'sda5' with the partition name in your case)

5. And then install grub: sudo grub-install --root-directory=/mnt /dev/sda

6. Reboot and verify that all is working fine.

B) If the previous repair doesn't solve your problem, you can try to use 'BootRepair'. You can find more information and instruction on how to use it at: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Boot-Repair

Hope that helps!

Answer 2

One potential fix (I can't promise this will work) would be to boot the system using an Ubuntu (or other Linux Distro) LiveCD and running the command (sudo) update-grub. This will cause grub to look for any OS kernels and add them correctly to the boot menu. Again, this is not a guaranteed fix, but it can at times work

Answer 3

Maybe you removed the kernel file or your grub configuration file have some mistakes. It can manually specify a kernel to boot like below,

grub> root (hd0,0)
grub> kernel /vmlinuz-i686 root=/dev/hda0
grub> boot

Change the hd0 or hda0 based on your hardware configuration