Tried to dual boot PureOS on Librem 14 then grub messed up and can't repair

Hardware
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I had been running windows as the sole OS on my Librem 14. Yeah, I know, silly thing to do. I decided to install PureOS alongside my windows partition as a dual boot. It would boot into Windows just fine but would not boot into PureOS.

So I wiped everything and installed a fresh copy of PureOS. Now it doesn’t boot at all and opens in grub rescue.

I tried downloading boot-repair from ppa and it couldn’t find it. Then I flashed a copy of the boot repair iso and booted from that. It loaded the Linux Mint OS with the boot repair on it, but since the hard disc was encrypted, it wouldn’t do the repair.

Then I tried using grub rescue commands to ls all the directories and find the one with the Linux system folders on it. Four were listed: (hd0), (hd0,msdos2), (hd0,msdos1), and (proc).

Looking at each drive with the ls command, all it would give back was that (hd0,msdos2) was a ext 2 file system.

So I tried decrypting the hd drive using the grub rescue command cryptounlock (hd0,msdos2) and while it asked for my passphrase, which was correct, it didn’t get me anywhere.

Eventually I tried reinstalling PureOS again, but without encrypting the hard drive, but the installation media would not allow me to proceeed if I deselected the encryption box.

I am now looking at installing a copy of Linux Mint on the machine, just so I can set it up without encryoption, then run the boot repair, then install PureOS again.

Any other ideas?

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Do you have a Live Boot flash drive, PureOS or some other distro?

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I installed it from a PureOS iso flashed with Balena both times (the dual boot time and when I wiped it all and installed again). The complete PureOS installation did not repair the boot loader which I presume windows messed with

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Under the assumption that there’s nothing on the laptop that you want to keep, maybe use gparted (live booted) to wipe out the partition table on the main (internal) drive and then try again to install PureOS from scratch.

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Thanks for the prompt response. I don’t know how to use gparted - how to find it or execute it. Noob.

What I have done now is I installed Mint and it has booted through several resets. It seems to have repaired the boot loader.

I’ll give that a run for a few days and if I want to go back to PureOS I will do a clean installation.

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For future reference (I understand that for now you are using Mint, and there’s nothing wrong with Mint):

sudo apt install gparted

(that installs it; it may already be installed but in that case the above command is harmless)

gparted

It’s a GUI application, so relatively suited to noobs and helping them avoid catastrophically destroying their disk’s contents :slight_smile: - although in this case if you were going to blow it all away anyway then you can’t really do much damage.

All you need to do is

  1. Select the correct device from the pull down menu on the right hand side, and then
  2. Click Device in the menu, then Click “Create Partition Table…” in the submenu.

It will then issue a dire warning about losing the entire contents of the disk. You then tell it to go ahead (because that’s what I was suggesting you do in this case).

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