grub 2 -restore boot loader onto portable hard drive

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Do you have a removable hard disk with dual-boot systems and Grub2 boot loader? This is a simple tutorial about how to restore/reinstall grub2 on a removable hard disk using a Ubuntu machine.

Commonly, to restore Grub2 is just this three commands to reinstall it on that device.

sudo apt-get install grub-pc grub-common     # commonly installed already.
sudo grub-install --root-directory=/ /dev/sda    # install grub onto device /dev/sda.
sudo update-grub       # create grub.cfg config file.

Now, we’re going to restore grub2 on a portable hard drive using a Ubuntu machine. First plug in this device, assume that it is “/dev/sdb” (use sudo fdisk -l to check it) and mounted on “/mnt” (sudo mount /dev/sdbX /mnt). Just use previous three commands with the second one changed to:

sudo grub-install --root-directory=/mnt/ /dev/sdb

Now, everything’s done but “sudo update-grub” which will create “grub.cfg” config file on Ubuntu local drive rather than the portable hard drive, and the boot entries are the system entries on local drive.

Note: before following, make a backup first!

1.) To make “grub.cfg” created onto portable hard drive, edit “/usr/sbin/grub-mkconfig”

change:

sysconfdir=/etc

into:

sysconfdir=/mnt/etc

And run this to create a “grub.cfg” that will finally be moved into portable drive (under /mnt/boot/grub/)

sudo grub-mkconfig -o /PATH/grub.cfg

2.) For the boot entries, just edit the section in “grub.cfg”. Following may help. About add/remove grub2 entries, refers to http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1195275

ls -l /dev/disk/by-uuid # look up uuid of all device
ls -l /mnt/boot   # look for useful kernels