I previously had Linux Mint Petra and Windows 7 installed on my Asus UX31a. This worked fine until I ran into some Wi-fi issues after messing around with NetworkManager. I decided since I didn't have too many files I should just re-install Mint, but then decided that eOS looked nicer so I'd try that.
So, I used UUI to put eOS on my flash drive, tried the demo first, didn't really do much but everything seemed ok. I then used the full installation option and put it on /dev/sda3 where my old mint installation was (windows on sda1 and windows recovery on sda4 or something). The first time I didn't give it swap space but I tried that later on after trying a couple of other things.
After the installation finished, the computer rebooted but would only boot into the USB through grub, and went to the grub rescue menu when I tried to boot without it in. I remember having a similar problem with Mint and resolved it with boot-repair.
First I tried re-installing a couple of times, same thing, no luck. Then I got boot-repair again and tried that. However during apt-get update I get the warning Failed to fetch cdrom://elementary OS 0.2 _Luna_ - Stable amd64 (20130810)/dists/precise/restricted/binary-amd64/Packages please use apt-cdrom to make this CD-ROM recognized by APT. and similar warnings for /binary-i386 and the same two for /main/binary-XXX.
I understand that Luna is based on Ubuntu and precise pangolin is a version of Ubuntu, is this the correct version? Also other postings online suggested using update manager to disable the "source" that was the cd I had installed. I didn't see that option in update manager. There weren't any issues adding the boot-repair repo or installing it so that seemed fine.
Incidentally while typing this, I tried to install boot-repair again to verify that I had no errors but this type I got the error 'unable to locate package boot-repair' Edit: boot-repair installed after another apt-get update. (Is there no option for strike-through?)
Boot-repair opens fine, I can run the standard fix and it gives me "grub-pc purge cancelled".
Another thing I noticed about Boot-repair was that the "advanced settings" tabs displayed different things than the default that was listed here https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Boot-Repair in most cases, my options were grayed out or non-existent and sometimes grayed out options differed from what the wiki said. I'm sorry I don't have a screenshot, again I can't get grub-repair back Edit: Under the GRUB options tab the wiki has "Purge GRUB before reinstalling it" de-selected whereas mine is grayed out and selected. Under the MBR options tab, I have nothing. Finally under the Other Options tab, they have "Repair Windows boot files" checked, mine is grayed out and unchecked.
I did run the boot-info thing, here is my paste; paste.ubuntu.com/7279707
Next I found a tutorial on re-installing grub from a liveCD. I can't find the tutorial now, but I'd seen it when fixing this with mint, I believe it was on the ubuntu community forums, I'm really sorry I can't locate it. The basic steps however were to mount the other partition, use chroot to uninstall grub and then re-install it. Everything worked fine up until the re-install grub step (the tutorial made me check I had internet so that wasn't it) where apt-get complained that the files/packages grub-pc, grub-common didn't exist. It told me that grub2-common did exist so I tried installing that and things seemed to work although I have no idea what it did.
Nothing changed the next time I rebooted however and so now I'm back in a live session with no idea what to do. I have access to the school's lab computers so at worst I can give my USB some other distro and try to use that to fix it, but hopefully it won't come to that.
