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Downgrade Grub 2 to Grub Legacy (Ubuntu 9.10)

I have experienced a load of problems with GRUB 2 (betas that are included in Ubuntu 9.10–why did they include a beta, anyway?) so I sought a method to downgrade, or revert to GRUB legacy (ver 0.97).

Comments 33

  1. jesus_gs wrote:

    Really useful, thanks.

    We should learn how to set grub2 up and so… but I prefer the old one meanwhile and avoid any problem.

    Posted 06 Dec 2009 at 12:08 pm
  2. brett wrote:

    Glad you found it useful.

    I agree, but some of the problems I have experienced are (i believe to be) bugs with grub2–not just configuration problems :) . But that is to be expected, it is still in beta.

    Posted 06 Dec 2009 at 12:46 pm
  3. bjokke wrote:

    Thanks a lot!

    GRUB2 is still buggy and it just don’t work well. These are some of the problems I noticed:
    - the disk and partition modifires are inconcequent. disk number start at 0 en partition number starts at 1.
    - when I installed grub2, I can boot one time and it’s broken again.
    - It doesn’t fit on the partition. (I have a good reason to want to do that)

    Posted 16 Dec 2009 at 3:45 am
  4. Pixel wrote:

    I had so many problems with GRUB 2. Sometimes the system started and sometimes not. Very confusing. But with GRUB 1 it works perfectly now.

    Thanks for the tutorial :) . I will trackback this post soon.

    Posted 26 Jan 2010 at 1:18 pm
  5. Owen wrote:

    Can you do this from the LiveCD?

    Posted 06 Feb 2010 at 6:21 am
  6. brett wrote:

    I think that should work, but haven’t tried it for myself. Post back if you try it out.

    Posted 06 Feb 2010 at 10:14 am
  7. Darrell wrote:

    When I enter the last command (echo

    Posted 06 Feb 2010 at 12:59 pm
  8. brett wrote:

    It may be a problem with the text in the command. The quotes should be double quotes that are vertical, they should not have a slant. The dashes before “set-selections” should be two individual dashes without a space between them, not one long dash (en vs em dash). My blog software may be changing the text in am attempt to make it more grammatically correct, but may in the long run be causing some problems.

    Let me know if this works.

    Posted 06 Feb 2010 at 2:12 pm
  9. Owen wrote:

    I have tried doing this from the LiveCD and it has done nothing. I get exactly the same boot screen I got before I did it.

    Posted 06 Feb 2010 at 4:07 pm
  10. brett wrote:

    Ok. I’m sure there is a way, but i’m not sure how. Why can’t you boot into Ubuntu first?

    Posted 06 Feb 2010 at 4:08 pm
  11. Owen wrote:

    The reason that I need to downgrade is because GRUB 2 is going to a command line boot, and says “No such drive” when I try to boot from the drive (hd0,1) which came up when I used ls or set or whichever it was. I can use “chainloader +1″ to boot XP (Which I’m posting from) but I can’t get into Ubuntu.

    Posted 06 Feb 2010 at 4:37 pm
  12. brett wrote:

    Try the link below. Even though the scenario doesn’t really apply to you, try using that as a starting point to get some kind of grub back on. Once you get it back, you can follow this tutorial for grub legacy.

    https://help.ubuntu.com/community/RecoveringUbuntuAfterInstallingWindows

    Posted 06 Feb 2010 at 7:17 pm
  13. Owen wrote:

    Thanks for the advice
    .
    It might be a bit tricky though, as I am using wubi and already I’ve several mentions of “Mount your Ubuntu partition”
    and it is not on a seperate partition

    Posted 06 Feb 2010 at 8:05 pm
  14. brett wrote:

    In that case, I have no idea! Sorry.

    Posted 06 Feb 2010 at 8:13 pm
  15. Owen wrote:

    brett :

    In that case, I have no idea! Sorry.

    That’s allright, thanks for the advice so far

    Posted 06 Feb 2010 at 8:27 pm
  16. utku wrote:

    @Darrell
    That command should be:
    echo

    Posted 09 Feb 2010 at 7:25 pm
  17. Happeh wrote:

    I followed the tutorial, when I rebooted it loaded GRUB Legacy, I chose Ubuntu 9.10, and guess what? My computer restarted again, not booting into ubuntu. I tried recovery mode and memtest, same results.

    Posted 05 Mar 2010 at 10:03 pm
  18. brett wrote:

    Sorry it didn’t work for you. As all internet tutorials go, proceed at your own risk :)
    Try this tutorial, see if you can get yourself back into ubuntu!
    Link.

    Posted 05 Mar 2010 at 10:06 pm
  19. Happeh wrote:

    Trying the tutorial right now. Making a live usb right now since my computer is in lack of a CD drive, thanks anyway, Brett.

    Posted 05 Mar 2010 at 10:51 pm
  20. burntout wrote:

    aptitude hold grub

    works also

    Posted 12 Mar 2010 at 9:06 am
  21. Mark wrote:

    Worked like a charm once I had set Inode size to 128 in GParted and did not format when installing Ubuntu 9.10. Much head-to-wall banging until discovered Inode sizing!

    Mark.

    Posted 12 Mar 2010 at 11:32 am
  22. somebody wrote:

    this also works with lucid, doesn’t it?

    Posted 20 Mar 2010 at 5:13 pm
  23. brett wrote:

    Awesome thanks.

    Posted 23 Mar 2010 at 12:22 pm
  24. Brandon wrote:

    Thanks for helping me escape the aweful Ubuntu 9.10 grub 1.97~beta4.
    I couldn’t get the server to timeout into a specific menu entry.

    Grub 0.97, just works! Thanks again.

    Posted 12 Apr 2010 at 9:34 am
  25. dd wrote:

    The new numbering (starting at 1 instead of 0) is a new feature of grub. You can read more here: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Grub2

    Posted 22 Jun 2010 at 4:32 pm
  26. dd wrote:

    This might be because of a virtual file system for the live cd – the changes you there make are not written to disk.

    Posted 22 Jun 2010 at 4:35 pm
  27. repa4ok wrote:

    thanks a lot!

    Posted 22 Jul 2010 at 4:27 am
  28. Nathan wrote:

    Hi
    Thanks for this, it worked a treat.
    Can you give instructions for how to restore Grub 2? I made the backups as you recommended.
    Thanks

    Posted 17 Sep 2010 at 2:45 pm
  29. Josh wrote:

    Huh, where’s the instructions? All I see is the first three lines of the post…

    Posted 20 Apr 2011 at 5:54 am
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  32. BJJ wrote:

    At this time it looks like BlogEngine is the top blogging platform out there right now. (from what I’ve read) Is that what you are using on your blog?

    Posted 16 Dec 2011 at 12:59 am
  33. linuxinstall wrote:

    Grub always fail to install after fresh Ubuntu installation and need a makeover

    Posted 13 Jan 2012 at 3:19 pm

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