# Can't reinstall Ubuntu via USB, goes to grub recovery



## ivan375 (May 2, 2016)

Have a bit of a strange situation here. I had two separate SSDs (one Ubuntu and the other Win10) with there own boots. I reinstalled Ubuntu a few weeks ago and it got rid of the separate boot that was for Win10 on the other drive as well.

Fast forward to yesterday when something goes terribly wrong and the Ubuntu boot gets corrupted or something. The motherboard logo sits there for over a minute now before the boot menu comes up, allowing me to select Ubuntu or Windows. Windows works perfectly fine once I get into it but Ubuntu itself is messed up and just barely functional. I just tried to reinstall ubuntu via usb bootable (that I tested in another pc) and it gives some lines that start with "(initramfs) Unable to find medium containing a live file medium." Attempting to boot usb with only windows drive present brings me straight to grub recovery. So I can't fresh install ubuntu on either drive.

With both drives present I can use Ubuntu boot (moves really slow now) to get to win10 (works fine once loaded). I backed all my files up and just want to wipe each drive so I can clean install each OS. Can I wipe the ubuntu drive while in win10 and get rid of the problematic boot? Or should I try to do something within the partially functioning ubuntu to clean both drives? I have yet to try either because I don't want to eliminate my way into win10 without fixing the problem.

Hopefully this makes some sense. Any help is appreciated.


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## silentbogo (May 2, 2016)

Check which SSD is your boot drive. Pretty sure after re-installation you've got a bootloader installed on both drives:
- SSD-1 has your new Ubuntu
- SSD-2 has your old(now non-existent) Ubuntu and Windows.

Check your BIOS settings and switch to the other drive (the one that has just Ubuntu). Reboot to Ubuntu. After that, open a terminal and run _grub-update(with sudo privilege) _so your new GRUB installation can see that there is also windows on the second drive. If you want to have Windows as default OS, google for changing the boot order in GRUB.


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## blobster21 (May 2, 2016)

First and foremost you should reinstall Windows 10 bootloader, so that you don't need grub anymore to boot.



> bootsect /nt60 drive_letter: /mbr
> 
> this fixes boot record of partition mapped to "drive_letter:" and the MBR of the disk where the partition is placed.
> 
> ...



After that, Windows 10 should boot straight after POST.

You could then proceed to wipe the ubuntu drive clean using Windows diskpart utility from a command line. As you can see there's relatively few commands to issue to wipe a drive :







Installing Ubuntu on top of the old ubuntu install should be a piece of cake after that.


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