On Wed 30 Mar 2016 at 11:17:29 -0400, Alan McConnell wrote: > I have read the guide online. It contains nothing that I did not > know, or have not followed. It says nothing about un-explained > failures. > > I have two further requests: 1. does anyone know how to proceed > from the prompt 'grub>' There are all kinds of commands available > from that point; will any lead me to the goal of getting a kernel > to boot?
Possibly. However, I would try to repair what looks like a broken GRUB installation. Boot the installer in Rescue mode. Proceed until you get a screen entitled "Enter rescue mode". Since you said / was on the fifth partition you presumably choose /dev/sda5 as the device to use as a root partition. From the next screen reinstall GRUB to /dev/sda. That will do for the moment. How does it go? > 2. What about Ubuntu? I can buy, or get a friend(not on campus here) > to make a boot Ubuntu disk. Ubuntu is sort of in the Debian line, and > can be made to support apt etc. Does it install without random > crashes? Would you say a bit more about these "random crashes" during the install? What do they look like? Did you get a red screen? Was there any message on the screen?
