I wanted to look at the new Ubuntu 9.10 Netbook Remix on my eeepc and downloaded the ISO file. I burned this to CD and booted my laptop from it (not the eeepc - no CD drive there). I wanted to use a spare 4GB SD card I had so connected a multi-card reader to a USB port of the laptop and inserted the card. I followed the instructions to install the Netbook Remix (and was careful to choose the SD card, rather than the hard drive of the laptop). Upon reboot of the laptop, I saw errors stating that the UUID of a device could not be found and found myself at a

grub rescue> prompt

Hmmm - thanks Ubuntu :-( The second time I did this I noticed that there is an option available by pressing a button on one page which allows the device which will have the boot partition overwritten to be selected. It defaults to the current machine - which is sensible, though ...

The laptop is running Debian - with one small boot partition and the rest of the disk being LUKS encrypted.

I booted from the Ubuntu Live CD and opened a terminal. My first thought was to try

grub-install /dev/sda

This failed due to something not found at /boot. I tried setting the --root-directory to /boot but this complained about something not being found at /boot/boot. Getting worse. I checked that the hard disk was visible. It seemed fine. After a couple more attempts (grub is unavailable on the CD) I thought to try mounting my hard disk boot partition, /dev/sda1 over the /boot of the CD.

i.e. sudo mount /dev/sda1 /boot

After this I found that I could run

grub-install /dev/sda

without error. So I crossed my fingers and rebooted the laptop and was pleased to see the laptop GRUB screen.

I hope that this is useful to someone.