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GRUB Rescue — Detailed Recovery from grub rescue> Prompt

Criticalboot

Overview

Step-by-step guide to recovering from the GRUB rescue prompt, finding your Linux partition, loading kernel modules, and fully reinstalling GRUB bootloader.

Key Details

  • grub rescue> prompt appears when GRUB cannot find its configuration or modules
  • This is a minimal GRUB shell with only basic commands: ls, set, insmod, normal
  • Common trigger: deleted or moved Linux partition, corrupted GRUB files, Windows update overwriting MBR
  • The rescue shell can manually load GRUB modules and boot Linux to perform a full repair
  • UEFI and BIOS systems have different GRUB installation procedures

Common Causes

  • GRUB modules directory (/boot/grub/) deleted, corrupted, or on an unmounted partition
  • Partition table modified (resized, moved, or deleted partitions)
  • Windows update or installation overwriting the MBR or EFI boot entry
  • GRUB installed for BIOS but system booting in UEFI mode (or vice versa)
  • Disk device name changed (sda became sdb) after adding or removing a drive

Steps

  1. 1At grub rescue>, list partitions: ls to see available devices
  2. 2Find the Linux partition: ls (hd0,gpt2)/ (try each partition until you see Linux files)
  3. 3Set root and prefix: set root=(hd0,gpt2) and set prefix=(hd0,gpt2)/boot/grub
  4. 4Load normal module: insmod normal then type normal to get the full GRUB menu
  5. 5Boot Linux and reinstall GRUB: sudo grub-install /dev/sda (BIOS) or sudo grub-install --target=x86_64-efi (UEFI)
  6. 6Update GRUB config: sudo update-grub to regenerate grub.cfg

Tags

grubrescuebootloaderrecoveryboot-repair

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Frequently Asked Questions

grub> is the full GRUB shell with all commands. grub rescue> is a minimal shell when GRUB cannot find its modules. In rescue, you must manually set root and prefix before loading the normal module.