Ask MetaFilter questions tagged with grub

Obsolete hardware + Linux = fail?

caution live frogs — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 07:56:47 -0800

Attention Linux gurus of MeFi: Attempting to set up an old Dell Latitude CS laptop as a Linux system (Xubuntu) for a coworker. Massive installation headaches ensue thanks to missing hardware. Any suggestions? The laptop is barely capable of doing much but all my friend wants is something she can use to browse the web. Basically a stone-age netbook.

The laptop was picked up used, and has no internal floppy drive, no internal CD drive. External drives are missing. It does have a Xircom 10/100 pcmcia card, but it refuses to netboot using that card even if "Cardbus Ethernet" is selected in BIOS as a boot device. One USB port, but won't boot from that either.

System was running Win2K, so I was able to use a Windows-based bootloader to get the machine to restart and begin installing Xubuntu over the network. All went fine until the end - machine failed to install GRUB. Tried LILO. Fail. Tried LILO on the primary partition instead of MBR. Fail. Tried reformatting the drive (which wiped out the Windows partition) and reinstalling GRUB and LILO. Fail.

I'm currently reinstalling the base system in hopes that the reformatting screwed things up - but not really confident.

So here's where I need help: I now have a machine that is running Linux from the install image, but I am afraid to reboot it as I have no backup method of starting it should it fail.

1 - what might be causing GRUB and LILO to fail? My initial thought was (a) the existing Windows partitions, which is why I repartitioned the drive, or (b) some weirdness with the disk itself (SCSI HDD) that is stopping GRUB from going to the MBR (but why won't LILO install on the / partition itself?)

2 - Any way for me to run the GRUB install manually, rather than using the install menu to do it? I am wondering if the installer is trying to send it to a drive that doesn't exist.

3 - If all else fails and I end up with a brick on my hands, should I be able to pull the drive out and fix the problem by plugging it in to another system using an external drive enclosure? (And if so, how do I do this without screwing up the bootloader on the system on which I do the repair?)

This makes me mad. I agreed to do the job before realizing that the damn computer didn't even have a floppy drive. I did a bare metal to network file server install in under 2 hours last weekend for my neighbors, and up until today was feeling like I knew what I was doing, but this one is reminding me just how weak my Linux skills are.

Get my dual-boot back

jozxyqk — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 17:12:09 -0800

DualBootFilter: I've moved a Windows XP hard drive into a new machine, in a physically different configuration, and I think I need to fix boot.ini and maybe the mbr but I'm not sure how. Difficulty: new location is a secondary drive to a primary Linux drive running GRUB. Help? OK so I've done some googling and even searching of askmefi, but I am feeling dumb about this so I need someone to spell it out for me.

Here's the longer story:
I used to have a dual-boot setup, with Linux as the primary boot device, running GRUB, as Primary IDE disk. Windows was a SATA disk, plugged in as the first SATA drive.

Now, I've got a new Linux installation that's on a SATA drive, and want to be able to boot the old Windows as well.
Linux is now the first SATA drive, and Windows is the second.
Linux is running GRUB, and recognizes the Windows partition as something bootable. From within Linux, I can even mount the NTFS partition and read and write files.
Unfortunately, when I try to boot the Windows partition, I get a blue screen that flashes by too fast (looks more like a chkdsk screen than a BSOD, if I blink), followed by a reboot which brings me back to my GRUB menu.
I've narrowed this down to probably being an issue with boot.ini, but a Windows XP bootable cd doesn't seem to be able to see the partition with the "bootcfg" command at all, so I can't use those tools.
I'd love to be able to use some magic to edit boot.ini in a text editor and at least get that Windows installation booting to Safe Mode.
I've tried a few things, but I get a variety of different errors depending on where I modify the numbers, from "Cannot load hal.dll" to "your boot device is corrupt"

So, hivemind, what can I do to convince the Windows drive that it can boot, without corrupting GRUB? Or is the blue-screen-that-passes-by telling me something worse is wrong?

The (original) contents of the boot.ini in question:

[boot loader]

timeout=30

default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS

[operating systems]

multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition" /noexecute=optin /fastdetect

and the contents of the "Windows XP" section of my grub/menu.lst:

title		Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition

rootnoverify	(hd1,0)

savedefault

makeactive

map		(hd0) (hd1)

map		(hd1) (hd0)

chainloader	+1

Looking for bog standard pub grub in London

Helga-woo — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 05:09:02 -0800

I'm looking for somewhere, easily accessible from central London, that does a bog standard 3-course roast dinner (or similar standard pub fayre) at about £15 a head for about 20 people in January. I was told, and I quote, "none of that fancy, foreign food"*

The plan was to go to a Harvester. The nearest Harvester to us is apparently an hour's drive up the A40. I vetoed this on the basis that I, and several others, already have to travel an hour to get into central London, and we would not travel to Victoria to then have to sit on a minibus on the A40. I also pointed out that we were all based in and around central London, surely there must be somewhere nearer that could cater for us.

I should learn not to speak up at times like these.

So, I'm looking for something like a Harvester, accessible from central London, zone 1 or 2, and more West-ish than East-ish.

The venue can offer fancy, foreign food, but there should be a meat and two-veg option.

Bonus points if:

- It's within the borough of the City of Westminster, as that's where we are based

- It isn't actually a pub (there's a small Muslim contingent, who don't turn usually turn up to the social events, I think you can figure out why. I would like to think we at least made an effort to find somewhere slightly more accommodating to everyone.) Baby steps, people, baby steps. I rock the boat enough by being 20 years younger than everyone else, and actually doing things. As much as I would love to capsize the whole vessel and start again, the annual social event is neither the time nor the place.

*Yes, I believe this definition of fancy, foreign food includes pasta and pizza.

Critical: How to fix MBR on Ubuntu/Vista dual-boot laptop?

meta.mark — Sun, 21 Sep 2008 16:45:22 -0800

How to I re-install, configure, or set the MBR on my laptop? I have a Sony VAIO VGN N series laptop. I recently partitioned and installed Ubuntu (Hardy Heron) successfully. Previously I had a Ubuntu/Vista dual boot using the default Ubuntu GRUB that was automatically installed during the setup. But I used EasyBCD in Vista and accidentally uninstalled the Vista Bootloader MBR. Now when I start up my computer all I get is something like "NTLDR not found Press Ctrl+Alt+Del to restart." In other words I have neither the Ubuntu GRUB or Vista Bootloader MBR working. How do I fix this so I can go back to dual-booting both systems? Please help!

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.

Hard drive diagnostic / repair?

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?

Screwed up partition table

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.