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My laptop bluescreened last night,and when I turned it on this morning I got the grub rescue prompt. I dual boot Windows 8.0 and Ubuntu. When the bios splash screen comes up, it lists all my HDDs, ram, etc, and then immediately goes to grub rescue without prompting me to press Delete or F12 to enter setup/boot list. I stuck in a flash drive with a linux live cd on it (that works fine) and while the bios lists it, it still boots to grub rescue. Keyboard works fine in grub rescue, so that's not the issue. I tried the 'take out battery and hold power button' trick with no luck. Grub lists all my HDDs correctly, although I can't confirm that all the partitions are showing up as I don't remember my partition scheme. At this point I'd be fine with just removing grub as it's being a pain, but I can't even boot the live cd or windows setup drive

EDIT: by removing different combinations of drives I have managed to get it to boot to grub, and via grub command line I can get it to boot usb linux. I tried reinstalling grub but that didn't help. Selecting windows from the grub menu says BOOTMGR not found, even though I can see it on the hdd in usb linux. Attempting to boot windows (or my windows usb installer) from the grub command line just gives a black screen with a blinking cursor in the corner

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I had something similar. What I did was unplugging the drive, insert windows cd, booted from the CD and then re-plug the drive. Or if the drive with grub doesn't have anything too important that cannot be extracted format the drive.

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  • I'll give that a shot, good idea! Drives are a pain to get to though :(
    – zacaj
    Commented Oct 15, 2017 at 16:02
  • @zacaj Let me know if it worked 😀
    – Adam Katav
    Commented Oct 15, 2017 at 17:12
  • After removing all HDDs I was able to get it to boot the linux live drive, but of course I can't fix my HDDs from there because they're all unplugged. Even after rebooting from that, I still can't access my bios, and it seems that every single HDD has a higher priority than my usb drive
    – zacaj
    Commented Oct 15, 2017 at 18:28
  • @zacaj Can you enter BIOS when all drives are unplugged? And when you're suppose to select a drive to boot from plug in the drive you want.
    – Adam Katav
    Commented Oct 15, 2017 at 18:33
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    Strange, I need to go for the next couple of hours. Your last resort will be to reset your bios. You can do it with the hardware but it will require to re-enter your windows key and probably cause unexpected problems. You can do it by removing the battery or ground the bios chip. Search for how to do it and the consequences online. DO IT ONLY WHEN YOU HAVE NO OTHER CHOICE. Good luck.
    – Adam Katav
    Commented Oct 15, 2017 at 19:43

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