I had a big computer problem today. Mum’s been complaining she can’t get into her PC and I can’t go over to the study to sort her out. I had an idea that mum could use the spare laptop which she could take to me when stuck. I started to prepare for that today by downloading the latest kubuntu and burning it to a flash drive.

I then tried to boot from the drive using my laptop and things went wrong. Instead of getting a menu, I was just taken to a grub command line which is a bit like a dos command prompt and has its own list of commands. I then tried to boot my laptop into its installed OpenSuse and the same happened. I got a grub command prompt instead of a menu.

The problem turned out to be a corrupted EFI partition and I think it took me about 5 hours to get things working properly. I suppose it wouldn’t have been that bad if I knew what I was doing but looking things up and finding the right answers takes time.

I don’t know how I’ll feel tomorrow but I’ll aim to install to the spare laptop then. With luck, one of the carers will be able to log on to mum’s desktop to get me a connection to the LAN so I can copy some files over. Mum’s problems usually are the battery in the mouse needs changing and that she’s forgotten how to log in. Or if she is logged in, she’s forgotten or lost the desktop shortcut she has to start Chromium and take her to the jigsaw site she enjoys.