thank you for the replies. surprise, his linux partitions are still there. but we're not out of the woods yet. tried chroot and grub-install, got "error: /usr/lib/grub/i386-pc/modinfo.sh doesn't exist." then downloaded boot-repair-disk and added it to my thumb drive of handy iso's. it quickly identified a sensible repair, but failed to perform it, saying "The current session is in Legacy mode. Please reboot the computer, and use this software in an EFI session. This will activate the function. For example, use a live-USB of Boot-Repair-Disk-64bit, after making sure your BIOS is set up to boot USB in EFI mode." so i'm guessing that means my friend's disc was setup as an EFI boot, meanwhile my handy thumb drive didn't boot in EFI mode, either for the live ubuntu i used to chroot and try grub-install, nor for the boot-repair-disk iso, and i'm guessing the bios in it's unquestionable wisdom is entirely inflexible, like if it's booted one way, it can't perform any operation on the other format, regardless that they are two separate discs, and grub, in it's unquestionable wisdom, uses the bios instead of direct i/o. have i got that about right? if so i guess i need to get another thumb drive for booting in EFI mode? or is there a way to tell grub to switch modes after grub boots up and before booting the iso? On Tue, Nov 12, 2019, 19:25 gregrwm <tclug1 at whitleymott.net> wrote: > a dear friend is bringing his laptop over tomorrow morning at 8:30am to > see if we can find anything he had on it (in ubuntu) before it died and he > took it to best buy for warranty service. they replaced the motherboard > and installed windows 10. how thoughtful. for starters i'll look at the > partitioning and see what might be there, but i rather expect to find > windows 10 was told to take the whole disk for scratch. i've never used > autopsy or anything like it so am entirely open to recommendations of what > approaches would be most likely (even if rather unlikely) to bring joy for > my friend. > tia, > greg > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://mailman.mn-linux.org/pipermail/tclug-list/attachments/20191113/fc70ac73/attachment.html>