Recently a friend of mine came to me and asked me for some help with his laptop . He is using Mint Linux ( based on Ubuntu edition 10.10) . So what happened ? During startup he pushed the power button to close fast the laptop. It is a Dell XPS 15 inch ( Intel I7 with Nvidia Optimis GPU card) with dual boot Win7 and Mint Linux.
After that the Dell laptop starts up in a GRUB prompt and not going further.
I started confident that I will fix it fast with my Linux/Grub knowledge. But to my surprize, after 4 hours of trials and errors I did not accomplished anything.
I tried the booting from USB and CD/DVD and various techniques to reinstall the GRUB. Acctualy I was able to see and access the data from HDD but I was not able to reinstall the GRUB. Each time the errors were more strange and the results was void. After each restart the GRUB prompt was there…
Then after such a long time I begin to think…
I remembered that after a partition resizing ( with Gparted tool) the pop-up menu was telling me that the Gparted tool will reconfigure the GRUB and read the new values. So I said : Why not ? Maybe it will work !
So I put the Ubuntu 12.04 Live DVD and after startup I opened the Gparted. I did not want to change to mush the partitions . So I took one partition and reduced the size with only 1Mb. The main idea is that I want Gparted to trigger the GRUB recovery ( re-install). So it did ! After resizing that 1Mb, the Grub was reinstalled and the new configuration was read. After reboot the Mint Linux was as new ! Thanks Gparted ! Acctualy I think that Gparted should habe a option ( somewhere in the menu) to fix the Grub or Boot problems. Anyway Gparted does this automatically at each partition change ( resize ).
So basically what I discovered is that is was easier to apply this method than to try all the crazy ideas found with Google. It take only 30 seconds. It is not necesary any root commands or any terminal tricks.
BIPEDU 