Several times I've been looking for a general "this is how you use a chroot to reinstall grub" question (bind-mount dev, proc, sys) to point people towards, but haven't found anything which neatly fits into the "canonical question" category.

Does U&L have "canonical questions" in the same way that ServerFault does?

Is there a good "use chroot to reinstall grub" question around that would be suitable?


I can't figure out from that post what Server Fault considers a "canonical question"; it seems to just be a regular question that gets asked a lot. If you're looking to post the question because you already know the answer and think it will help other people, go for it. Some questions that might already fit:

  • The canonical answer link directs to an article from the StackOverflow blog; briefly, it's a handy reference "How do I solve common problem X" index. – Andrew Sep 25 '13 at 5:37
  • @Andrew I saw the blog post, but SF seems to have awarded the phrase "canonical question" some higher meaning. The blog post just means "write comprehensive answers so people don't need to keep asking"; canonical questions aren't some separate type of question. I'm not sure what you mean by "index" either -- the Wikipedia-style giant list of canonical questions they have on meta seems pointless, if that's what you're talking about. There's no connection between canonical questions other than "they have good answers"; you might as well just read the top-voted answers on the site – Michael Mrozek Sep 25 '13 at 13:48

We don't have a formal repository of these, but if you feel you can write one, please go ahead!

I've also been looking for that one several times, and didn't find one on Ask Ubuntu last time I looked either, but I never got around to doing it. Ideally this should be written while testing in a VM, which takes a bit of time.

Michael Mrozek found after BIOS splash, will not boot, asked to select OS, but can't, which is a pretty good reference for Grub2 on Debian and derivatives.

If you write a canonical answer, be sure to state which distributions it applies to. Different distributions set up Grub in different ways. I think terdon's answer is suitable for Grub 2 on Debian and derivatives, the Arch wiki probably has something good already, which leaves Grub 1 on Red Hat as a major candidate for a canonical question (unless this is covered in the RH manual).

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