Ask MetaFilter posts tagged with grub

Vista/Ubuntu Dual Boot desperate help needed :(

thesonofmorgoth — Sat, 24 May 2008 20:51:51 -0800

How to dual boot vista/ubuntu hardy heron and get everything set up. More details Inside. Starting to pull hair out :( Just a warning guys im just going to spill every piece of info i think might help solve this problem below. Sorry in advance but im at wits end.

I was planning on dual booting Vista/Hardy Heron on my compalIFL90 notebook. To do this i completely formatted the harddrive and installed vista first, giving it 40 gigs and leaving the other 120 gigs as free space. After i had installed vista i went back and installed ubuntu using the desktop 32 bit cd and just told it to use the largest contigous file. After i started playing around with my new ubuntu desktop i heard that it would be nice if i got my own home, root, and swap partitions so i went back and deleted my ubuntu partition,this time starting the manual partition mode. I made a 20 gig root, 4 gig swap and the rest of the gigs as home. I thought i was home free.

I tried following THIS GUIDE to set up my Compal, as it seems some hardware was not supported out of the box. I also installed compiz fusion and emerald theme manager, as well as the restricted drivers for my nvidia card.

and now all of a sudden im getting all these problems:

1. When i start up the computer sometimes all it says is GRUB loading stage 1.5 and just hangs there. I have to manually shut down the computer to get it back up, and then it allows me to boot into ubuntu or vista.
2. When i boot into ubuntu i just come to a white screen with a cursor sometimes, and i again have to manually shut down.
3. Once when just surfing the web this pink or purple fuzz started to border my windows and just mysteriously diapeared when i restarted.
4. I cant hibernate or sleep in my ubuntu.... while this is discussed in the above link i really dont get it.

So basically my whole installation is just crapping itself up and i have no idea why. Im not sure what i did wrong :(

So any help would be appreciated guys, and I wouldnt mind reformmating everything and starting over if i know it would work Thanks :D for reading this long post and i really hope i can get this to work i wanna learn linux :(

Dear PC, I swear I won't ever mess with your partitions again if you just this once...

willie11 — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 12:06:06 -0800

Oh crap! While attempting to clear, reformat, and merge my ubuntu partition with my primary NTFS Windows partition, I somehow managed to give the GRUB boot-loader brain damage. Now I can't boot in to either partition need to fix this before my girlfriend comes home and sees that I've rendered her computer useless. When I boot, I get the following error,

Booting form local disk...
GRUB Loading stage 1.5

GRUB loading, please wait...
Error 17

And it just hangs there forever, mocking and blinking... blinking and mocking... I wiped, reformatted, and merged my existing linux partition in to my windows partition while in windows using partition magic. However, upon reboot, I received that error. The file structure is intact, I checked with the liveCD, but GRUB is useless.

How can I get windows back?

Ubuntu ate my XP bootage

onshi — Wed, 09 May 2007 17:11:05 -0800

Ubuntu ate my WinXP via Grub: help me induce vomiting? After an apparently botched Ubuntu installation, I now only have Ubuntu boot options visible in the GRUB bootloader. From inside Ubuntu, I can see that all of my Windows XP data and NTFS partitions are alive and well (thankfully).

How do I get back into windows?

Backround: XP on disk 0, NTFS data partition and Ubuntu partitions on disk 1. The Ubuntu installation is totally expendible.

Computer refuses to let us erase the hard drive

billtron — Sun, 28 Jan 2007 20:34:49 -0800

How can I wipe a hard drive if I can't boot from CD and there is no floppy drive? We want to install winXP on a machine with Ubuntu (eventual dual-boot). My friend's computer is not working. He installed ubuntu 6.10, and now it won't boot from CD. We have tried doing things to the grub, to no avail. We can't tell if the cdrom is hda or hdb or hd5hkjhjth. We can provide more details if this ends up being the best way to fix the problem.

There's another post on ask.mf, which explains lots of scary ways of accessing the hard drive through the internet or via a usb. Should we try them? Or should we buy a floppy drive for $5? Or should we take the hard drive out of his computer, put it in mine, and wipe it clean, then put it back and see if the CDrom will be read? We are at wit's end. Please help, ObiWans.

Good riddance?

furtive — Mon, 28 Aug 2006 18:59:59 -0800

Help me make my choice from one of the three options below: 1) Fix Windows so that it boots without messing up my Ubuntu. 2) Remove Windows completely. I don't need it anyways. 3) Shrink Windows to the bare minimum and reclaim the space with Ubuntu. I made the switch to Ubuntu a short while ago and have no inclination on returning to Windows. Recently when I tried to boot into Windows (XP Pro) I got a BSOD with the following error:
UNMOUNTABLE_BOOT_VOLUME
My boot.ini looks good. I did some research and noticed that if I do an fdisk that I get the same error for all my partitions:



furtive@furtive-laptop:~$ sudo fdisk -l

Password:

Disk /dev/hda: 40.0 GB, 40007761920 bytes

16 heads, 63 sectors/track, 77520 cylinders

Units = cylinders of 1008 * 512 = 516096 bytes

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System

/dev/hda1   *           1       50565    25484728+   7  HPFS/NTFS

Partition 1 does not end on cylinder boundary.

/dev/hda2           50570       76357    12996585   83  Linux

Partition 2 does not end on cylinder boundary.

/dev/hda3           76357       77520      586372+   5  Extended

Partition 3 does not end on cylinder boundary.

/dev/hda5           76357       77520      586341   82  Linux swap / Solaris

furtive@furtive-laptop:~$

It seems that these "does not end on cylinder boundary" messages are common when the partitions are made using megabytes instead of cylinders. I honestly don't feel like reloading my notebook again (no CD drive) and so I think it's come down to three choices:

1) Fix Windows so that it works without messing up my Ubuntu. I haven't seen any solutions to this yet, but I'm all ears. My ntfs drive is mounted with ntfs 3-g in Ubuntu if that helps.

2) Remove Windows completely. I don't need it anyways. I'd love to be able to reclaim that space for my Ubuntu.

3) Shrink Windows to the bare minimum and reclaim the space with Ubuntu. I know it was possible to do this during the install, but I don't see how to do it now.

I'll be up all night and quick to respond to any questions.

How did I lose weight by eating MORE and exercising LESS?

Chorus — Mon, 24 Jul 2006 17:23:36 -0800

How did I lose weight by eating MORE and exercising LESS? I'm just been in hospital for a week [nothing serious, mind. I was only in for observation for something I turned out not to have at all -_-], and to my surprise I've gone and lost noticeable weight - approx 2inches from my torso alone. What's really perplexing me is, while I was in hospital I ate like a *pig*, like, at least three times what I usually eat at home. Plus I was bedridden for the whole week and *still* managed to drop the inches.

At home, meals looked like this:
Breakfast: 2 buttered toast, tea.
Lunch: Instant noodles.
Dinner: Can o' microwaveable stew or frozen pizza.
Snacks: 2 granola bars

In hospital, for seven days, my meals were thusly [this is what all patients were given. I cleared my plate at every meal]:
Breakfast: Bran cereal, 2 toast, marmalade tea.
Typical Lunch: Chicken breast/Shepard's pie/fish fillet, scoop o' mash, veg, gravy, dessert [anything from icecream to cheesecake to fruit salad to tart], 2 slices o' bread and butter, tea.
Typical Evening Tea: Mixed grill [2 rashers, 2 sausages, pudding, grilled tomato] OR beans on toast OR scrambled eggs on toast, 2 slices o' bread and butter and jam, tea.
Snacks: The possibility of THREE more teas/coffees throughout the day.

I should also add that I was on no werid medication other than the odd Paracetamol. I've a feeling the weight loss has something to do with complex carbohydrates or... something...

Anybody got any insight? It's rather obvious now that my "home" diet was... um, very bad indeed -_- I fully intend to use this "hospital diet" as a what-to-eat guide and since I've been home a few days, I haven't suddenly piled on the pounds. I have more energy [as much as can be expected after a week in hospital] and my hunger is on the strict schedule of 8am, 1pm, 6pm, like in the hospital.

Am I going to wake up one morning as Jabba the Hut though? I feel all the extra food from that week is going to amush me in the future. No, I'm not exercising now either. Yes, that amount of hospital food everyday seems piggish to me.

easy way to restore mbr in winXP after removing linux partition?

Grod — Sun, 11 Jun 2006 17:49:52 -0800

I was using GRUB to dual boot a linux partition and a winXP partition. I set this up ages ago and recently needed to remove the linux partition. I used Partition magic because I was feeling lazy. Now when I boot I get some grub error. I can boot using a morphix liveCD and selecting "boot from first partition" or whatever it actually says. WinXP doesn't have fdisk so I can't fdisk /MBR, and I'm not familiar enough with diskpart to want to mess around. Although I feel like an idiot for asking this question, what simple and probably obvious command will restore the MBR to it's pre-grub state? Thanks.

Cannot Boot into XP or Grub

bloodniece — Thu, 01 Jun 2006 09:22:14 -0800

How do I recover Windows XP Pro boot record (MBR)? Scenario: Partitioned HD for Linux, Rebooted in XP ok, Reboot, install Linux and grub, reboot no Grub or XP. Ran XP Disc - Recovery Console (see extended explaination) Partitioned with Partition Magic HD for Linux.
Rebooted, Installed Linux (Debian) and grub.
Reboot --> no XP or Grub (no operating system found)
Rebooted with XP install disc, Ran Recovery Console
Ran these commands:
C: CD ..
C: ATTRIB –H C:\boot.ini
C:ATTRIB –S C:\boot.ini
C:ATRIB –R C:\boot.ini
C: del boot.ini
C: BOOTCFG /Rebuild
C: CHKDSK /R /F
C: FIXBOOT C: (had to do this since it tried to write a boot record to the partition I made for Linux E:, which I placed after C:)
No XP or Grub after reboot.
P.S. I even tried fixmbr to no avail.

Question number 14028

Daddio — Fri, 14 Jan 2005 14:45:17 -0800

My WinXP system won't boot. Knoppix comes up fine, and complains that it can't read the partition table. I've got The Ultimate Boot CD; does anyone have a methodology for making things right, or at least recovering whatever I can from the hard drive?

Question number 7842

reklaw — Thu, 10 Jun 2004 03:15:46 -0800

I was trying to install Linux (the latest version of that damned Mandrake), and I seem to have screwed my partition table. Neither Mandrake nor Windows XP will boot -- I'm posting this message from a Knoppix livecd. Mandrake just goes to a blank screen and hangs but Windows gives a message about a missing dll. What can I do to fix this? I'm in over my head here.