HOWTO: Boot Recovery (dual boot configuration)

[Moderator Brian Masinick]

HOWTO recover from a boot loader failure (in this case involving a “dual boot” configuration)

In the thread –
“19.3 update from 19.2 knocked out my antiX – MX Linux dual boot”
URL: https://www.antixforum.com/forums/topic/19-3-update-from-19-2-knocked-out-my-antix-mx-dual-boot/#post-43378

This was a community collaboration and AA BB did a really nice job
of summarizing the solution. This HOWTO has been edited, incorporating the work cited.

AA BB wrote:

Success !…For the record, here’s what I did…

Using my Live MX Linux USB
I was able to get to the “Boot rescue menu”
From there, I selected “Find Grub Bootloaders” which produced the following list of items:
* live USB
* antiX 19.3
* item3 (with a vague description)

Next, I selected item 3, which successfully booted into my MX Linux partition
Once inside MX Linux, I used MX tools > Boot repair to reinstall GRUB

Everything now works. I can now dual boot to antiX 19.3 or MX Linux.

Many thank to all who helped me resolved this.

NOTE: The antiX Live images are also capable of performing the same or similar tasks.

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Brian Masinick

[Moderator Brian Masinick]

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1) https://www.ubuntupit.com/top-15-linux-data-recovery-tools-the-professionals-choice/
2) https://www.techrepublic.com/blog/10-things/10-linux-rescue-tools-for-recovering-linux-windows-or-mac-machines/
3) https://www.fossmint.com/linux-rescue-recovery-tools/
4) http://www.linuxandubuntu.com/home/5-best-linux-distributions-to-recover-dead-computers-data-linux-data-recovery
5) https://www.fosslinux.com/1532/create-a-boot-repair-live-usb-disk-drive-in-ubuntu-linux-mint-and-elementary-os.htm

4) specifically mentions antiX; a couple of the links mention either KNOPPIX or SystemRescueCD; these two are frequently used or mentioned by people who routinely keep boot and system rescue tools.

It should be noted, especially for our audience, that both antiX and MX Linux are quite capable of functioning as either boot or system rescue tools; the tools each of them have are very good at these tasks, easily accessed and able to fix or recover data issues and system boot failure, as well as many other routine system management routines. While there are LOTS of good tools out there, if you don’t already have them in your “repair arsenal”, why not learn and use the features in either antiX or MX Linux? I think you will be pleased at their capabilities. MX Linux has really good tutorials available too; we’re getting better at creating a lot of good tutorials for antiX too, but we do lack a specific place (other than this forum) from which to access the collection of HOWTO and tutorial articles. Start by looking under the section Forum › Forums › General › Tips and Tricks ›

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Brian Masinick

[Member ex_Koo]

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Thanks AA BB & masinick
The grub rescue screen has always been a gray area for me.
Few weeks ago I installed another runit system and it took over the grub boot loader, so I Booted to antiX opened CC and when to Boot Repair, Reinstall GRUB bootloader rebooted and antiX was back in control of the boot loader. Awesome stuff

[Member olsztyn]

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Just want to add that antiX Live is one among the best boot managers out there:

– Find all Grub bootloaders and boot
– Find Windows bootloaders and boot
– Find all Grub menus and boot.

If you have multi-boot system (Windows + Linux partition) and upon (re)installing any you find that cannot boot others, antiX Live can boot them right from the menu of all them. Fixing Grub is another thing…
I found that other (more advertised) boot managers do not seem to provide any more functionality than antiX Live.
Just my two cents…

Live antiX Boot Options (Previously posted by Xecure):
https://antixlinuxfan.miraheze.org/wiki/Table_of_antiX_Boot_Parameters

[Moderator Brian Masinick]

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olsztyn wrote:

Just want to add that antiX Live is one among the best boot managers out there:

– Find all Grub bootloaders and boot
– Find Windows bootloaders and boot
– Find all Grub menus and boot.

If you have multi-boot system (Windows + Linux partition) and upon (re)installing any you find that cannot boot others, antiX Live can boot them right from the menu of all them. Fixing Grub is another thing…
I found that other (more advertised) boot managers do not seem to provide any more functionality than antiX Live.
Just my two cents…

I agree with you. I have not checked every single feature of the MX Linux live boot system in detail, but I have experimented fairly recently with quite a few of the antiX boot features. Everything that the MX Linux live boot loader does I’m pretty certain that antiX can do as well. That should not be very surprising, since both Dolphin Oracle and anticapitalista have actively contributed at one time or another to both projects. What’s interesting – and it is something I have written about before, is that back in the early history, antiX emerged as a lightweight alternative to MEPIS, and some “builds” were introduced to the “MEPIS Lovers Community” around the time of SimplyMEPIS 3.4.3, according to a response that anticapitalista shared with me recently.

However, when MEPIS went dormant in 2012 – there was an early build for MEPIS 2012 that never materialized into a release, the MEPIS Lovers Community remained active. Several of the participants created respin efforts, and our own anticapitalista was the first developer to assist the MEPIS Lovers Community into launching MX Linux. I find this especially interesting because MEPIS was the “sponsor” organization that helped anticapitalista to get antiX introduced. It’s ironic that the existing antiX development team contributed to the establishment of another distribution to replace MEPIS called MX Linux. At first it was only a Xfce desktop-based distribution, but recently the lightweight Fluxbox and the full-featured KDE (which was in the final release of MEPIS) are now available in MX Linux.

Because of this strong degree of cooperation between the projects I believe that many of the tools share common technology and that’s why both MX Linux and antiX make GREAT recovery systems, especially when you can carry a USB on your keychain or in your pocket.

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Brian Masinick

[Forum Admin anticapitalista]

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The live boot loader stuff was developed by fehlix, a MX Linux developer.
Of course the code was written and tested to be used on MX and antiX.
Cooperation works.

Philosophers have interpreted the world in many ways; the point is to change it.

antiX with runit - leaner and meaner.

[Moderator Brian Masinick]

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anticapitalista wrote:

The live boot loader stuff was developed by fehlix, a MX Linux developer.
Of course the code was written and tested to be used on MX and antiX.
Cooperation works.

Absolutely! I suspected they had “common roots”, but I did not examine both of the tools side by side.
Now we know that they are virtually identical.

It sure is nice to have two really great distributions that work well together, yet have somewhat different user interfaces and interests.
To me they BOTH work superbly well, and I use them more than any other distributions!

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Brian Masinick

[Member rayluo]

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olsztyn wrote:

Just want to add that antiX Live is one among the best boot managers out there:

– Find all Grub bootloaders and boot
– Find Windows bootloaders and boot
– Find all Grub menus and boot.

If you have multi-boot system (Windows + Linux partition) and upon (re)installing any you find that cannot boot others, antiX Live can boot them right from the menu of all them. Fixing Grub is another thing…

Hi olsztyn, can you elaborate on which menu you were talking about? I recently encountered such a need, but the antiX liveUSB boot menu contains 4 items for booting antiX itself, and then one “Boot from Hard Disk”. But the latter simply brings me to square one, where the hard disk was not able to boot.

Olsztyn, I thought you would hint some menu items to allow me to choose “boot from hard disk partition 1”, “boot from hard disk partition 2”, etc.. Or did I miss something?

[Member Xecure]

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rayluo wrote:

Hi olsztyn, can you elaborate on which menu you were talking about?

olsztyn is talking about the Boot Rescue Menus ound in the grub live boot menus. You can reach it from the syslinux menus selecting “Switch to Grub Booloader” and then selecting Boot Rescue Menus
Lets you search for EFI boot options, grub menus or Windows installations.

From: https://antixlinuxfan.miraheze.org/wiki/AntiX_Live_System#UEFI_Bootloader

Boot Rescue Menus is one of the most advanced menus available for the antiX Live system. It can help the user boot into systems that have a broken Boot manager or alternatively boot into the BIOS/UEFI configuration screen of your motherboard. To exit this screen, press the Escape key.

Find EFI bootloaders will search for all EFI bootloaders in the EFI partition for all hard drives available and display them (if any were found). You can then select one and try to boot into that system.
Find GRUB menus to find and boot into Linux based operating systems (and other systems that use Grub as boot manager).
Find Windows bootloaders, as before, to find and search all Windows systems (boot loaders) from all available Hard Drives. Very useful for when you want to boot into Windows after replacing (accidentally) the Master Boot Record (or EFI order) of your machine (and then restore it from windows if so desired).
Reboot into BIOS/UEFI Setup is a very useful option (for those who don’t know the key combination to access their BIOS or cannot do it with any other method) to access your BIOS Settings directly from the antiX Live Bootloader.

antiX Live system enthusiast.
General Live Boot Parameters for antiX.

[Anonymous]

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Switch to Grub Bootloader

rayluo, FYI that is missing for me also.

When betatesting antiX 19, rayluo and I sifted through the LegacyBIOS liveboot menu with a fine-toothed comb

https://www.antixforum.com/forums/topic/can-we-have-a-more-clear-persist-boot-menu/#post-27651
proofreading the F1 helptext and trying to figure out how to shoehorn an extra screenful of info into the helpdoc

              | Persist contents    | rootfs content
  Menu Item   |  of /home/*         | occupies ram
              |                     | during session?
--------------+---------------------+----------------
persist_home  | Yes                 | N/A
persist_root  | Yes                 | Yes
--------------+---------------------+----------------
p_static_root | Yes (inside rootfs) | No
--------------+---------------------+----------------
persist_static| Yes (saved into     | No
persist_all   | separate homefs)    | Yes

I didn’t recall any mention of “Switch to Grub Bootloader”…
so I rechecked both antiX 17 and 19 in virtualbox. For LegacyBIOS, it’s not there.

[Member rayluo]

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Anonymous wrote:

Switch to Grub Bootloader

rayluo, FYI that is missing for me also.

When betatesting antiX 19, rayluo and I sifted through the LegacyBIOS liveboot menu with a fine-toothed comb

https://www.antixforum.com/forums/topic/can-we-have-a-more-clear-persist-boot-menu/#post-27651
proofreading the F1 helptext and trying to figure out how to shoehorn an extra screenful of info into the helpdoc

…

I didn’t recall any mention of “Switch to Grub Bootloader”…
so I rechecked both antiX 17 and 19 in virtualbox. For LegacyBIOS, it’s not there.

Thanks Skidoo for bringing back those fond memories. Good old days. 🙂 The outcome of that conversation was the re-enable of that “Press F1 for Help” message. Better than nothing. 🙂

Xecure wrote:

olsztyn is talking about the Boot Rescue Menus found in the grub live boot menus. You can reach it from the syslinux menus selecting “Switch to Grub Booloader” and then selecting Boot Rescue Menus
Lets you search for EFI boot options, grub menus or Windows installations.

From: https://antixlinuxfan.miraheze.org/wiki/AntiX_Live_System#UEFI_Bootloader

Thanks for the hint, Xecure. I double checked, and reached to same conclusion as Skidoo found out, that the “Boot Rescue Menus” does not exist in BIOS Boot Loader. I tested it with antiX 19.2 Hannie 64bit. (It does exist in the UEFI Boot Loader when I test it on my another newer computer which has UEFI support, but that won’t help people with BIOS computer.) Perhaps, that otherwise very helpful wiki page would need to be modified?

[Member Xecure]

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From antix 19 Realease notes:

Live grub rescue options (thanks to fehlix). You can now switch between Grub and Syslinux when you boot the live system in “legacy mode”.

ALL my isos have it. I cannot find the links for the original antiX 19 release isos (probably removed at some point in time). So, lets try for antiX 19.1 base 32 and 64 bits:

antiX 19.1 base 32 bits (Iso in VBox) – Legacy Boot

antiX 19.1 base 64 bits (iso in VBox) – Legacy Boot

This is what it looks like after switching to grub menu from syslinux:

You can see that at the botom there is an option “Boot Rescue Menus”

Maybe it is not the iso, but something related to Live USB Maker. I will try booting from legacy mode with my laptop (or from a VM, if possible) and upload some pictures.
EDIT: Photo from my laptop booting live USB of antiX 19.2.1 base x64 from Legacy BIOS boot.

This Live USB was created using the antiX Live USB maker in antiX 19.
My other antiX 19.1 core has a zero second timer at boot, so it was imposible to get the photo on the laptop.

rayluo wrote:

Perhaps, that otherwise very helpful wiki page would need to be modified?

Ok. If you or someone else cannot, I will take some time and edit it so that it says (New since antiX 19)

• This reply was modified 2 years, 6 months ago by Xecure. Reason: Live USB legacy boot photo

antiX Live system enthusiast.
General Live Boot Parameters for antiX.

[Anonymous]

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[Member Xecure]

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Anonymous wrote:

(02 November 2020)
Could this be related to a snapshot? Or maybe when you save the boot parameters, Switch to grub disapears?
How did you create that system? If we figure this out we may be able to solve the problem.

antiX Live system enthusiast.
General Live Boot Parameters for antiX.

[Anonymous]

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sorry about omitting text in my earlier post. I was still testing variations and had intended to edit that further before pressing “post”

the DATE shown in bootmenu misled me to think that was a pristine 19.2 iso, but it was not. It was a 19.2 iso created via isosnapshot.

Water over the bridge ~~ whatever was what back in 19.2, I retested using fresh 19.3, created a fresh snapshot iso and booted that. Yes, the “switch to grub bootloader” menu entry is displayed, even booting the snapshot iso,

Today’s testing brings to light a reported 2yrs ago iso-snapshot bug:
User is allowed to select a custom namestring for the snapshot, but that namestring is not transferred ~~ instead, as seen in the screencap, the default bootmenu entry namestring becomes just “antiX” (the default _timedate suffix is lost, and is not replaced by the user-supplied namestring)

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