[GWatt]

Not without knowing your partition layout. Although, it seems strange that you have have 6 partitions on your second hard drive. Most don't go past 4, unless you have an LVM setup, which ubuntu doesn't do by default.

[MorphiusFaydal]

GWatt, on 7 Feb, 2008 - 07:39 PM, said:

Not without knowing your partition layout. Although, it seems strange that you have have 6 partitions on your second hard drive. Most don't go past 4, unless you have an LVM setup, which ubuntu doesn't do by default.

ATA (both serial and parallel) support up to 16 partitions (4 primary, 12 logical). And as far as I recall, Ubuntu sets up the majority of stuff in logical partitions.

@aj32

And I don't understand why you'd say GRUB is a bad bootloader. It's completely logical as to why it would fail if you've been messing around with your partitions or hard drives.

I'm going to guess that your system looks like this:

HARD DRIVE 0:
- Partition 1 - sda2 - Windows XP Media Center
HARD DRIVE 1:
- Partition 1 - Logical partition - sdb6 - Win2k
- Partition 2 - Logical partition - sdb7 - Linux swap
- Partition 3 - Logical partition - sdb8 - Ubuntu main install.

What confuses me is why MCE is on the second partition of sda... Unless you've got another partition on that drive that's solely data storage or similar.

GRUB is probably installed to the MBR on the drive with MCE.

My guess is that you've either switched the drives in the BIOS, or you've got a USB drive plugged in. Unplug it if you do. The BIOS probably marked this drive as "Drive 0" rather than "Drive 3", as you'd expect. That is a hardware issue, not the fault of GRUB.

[GWatt]

MorphiusFaydal, on 7 Feb, 2008 - 10:40 PM, said:

GWatt, on 7 Feb, 2008 - 07:39 PM, said:

Not without knowing your partition layout. Although, it seems strange that you have have 6 partitions on your second hard drive. Most don't go past 4, unless you have an LVM setup, which ubuntu doesn't do by default.

ATA (both serial and parallel) support up to 16 partitions (4 primary, 12 logical). And as far as I recall, Ubuntu sets up the majority of stuff in logical partitions.

Ubuntu doesn't use LVMs by default. You have to download the alternative install cd to even get dm_mod. Unless you were talking about what I think of as extended partitions. I think that's the fdisk term anyway. I've never really used extended partitions.

[MorphiusFaydal]

GWatt, on 7 Feb, 2008 - 11:24 PM, said:

MorphiusFaydal, on 7 Feb, 2008 - 10:40 PM, said:

GWatt, on 7 Feb, 2008 - 07:39 PM, said:

Not without knowing your partition layout. Although, it seems strange that you have have 6 partitions on your second hard drive. Most don't go past 4, unless you have an LVM setup, which ubuntu doesn't do by default.

ATA (both serial and parallel) support up to 16 partitions (4 primary, 12 logical). And as far as I recall, Ubuntu sets up the majority of stuff in logical partitions.

Ubuntu doesn't use LVMs by default. You have to download the alternative install cd to even get dm_mod. Unless you were talking about what I think of as extended partitions. I think that's the fdisk term anyway. I've never really used extended partitions.

Yeah... extended partitions are logical partitions. I use them mainly when I only have one drive. hda1 = windows, hda5 = /boot, hda6 = swap, hda7 = /home, hda8 = /

[GWatt]

Alright, after that segway. . .
I have a question, aj32. Was Windows the first OS to be installed under your current layout?
If it was, your grub.conf (or menu.lst) file should have someplace in it:

title		Windows NT/2000/XP
root		(hd0,0)

[MorphiusFaydal]

GWatt, on 8 Feb, 2008 - 01:53 AM, said:

Alright, after that segway. . .
I have a question, aj32. Was Windows the first OS to be installed under your current layout?
If it was, your grub.conf (or menu.lst) file should have someplace in it:

title		Windows NT/2000/XP
root		(hd0,0)

Look at the second to last entry in his menu.lst... It's for XP MCE at hd(0,1)... I commented on that being odd.

Although that should cause problems unless he's trying to boot Windows and that's the wrong partition. right now, GRUB can't find menu.lst at all....

[GWatt]

OK, I'm not running a linux atm, but could this be compounding the issue?

# This is a divider, added to separate the menu items below from the Debian
# ones.
title		Other operating systems:
root

He's got an empty root declaration. I don't know what that causes GRUB to do, but it certainly can't be helping.

[aj32]

MorphiusFaydal, on 7 Feb, 2008 - 10:40 PM, said:

GWatt, on 7 Feb, 2008 - 07:39 PM, said:

Not without knowing your partition layout. Although, it seems strange that you have have 6 partitions on your second hard drive. Most don't go past 4, unless you have an LVM setup, which ubuntu doesn't do by default.

ATA (both serial and parallel) support up to 16 partitions (4 primary, 12 logical). And as far as I recall, Ubuntu sets up the majority of stuff in logical partitions.

@aj32

And I don't understand why you'd say GRUB is a bad bootloader. It's completely logical as to why it would fail if you've been messing around with your partitions or hard drives.

I'm going to guess that your system looks like this:

HARD DRIVE 0:
- Partition 1 - sda2 - Windows XP Media Center
HARD DRIVE 1:
- Partition 1 - Logical partition - sdb6 - Win2k
- Partition 2 - Logical partition - sdb7 - Linux swap
- Partition 3 - Logical partition - sdb8 - Ubuntu main install.

What confuses me is why MCE is on the second partition of sda... Unless you've got another partition on that drive that's solely data storage or similar.

GRUB is probably installed to the MBR on the drive with MCE.

My guess is that you've either switched the drives in the BIOS, or you've got a USB drive plugged in. Unplug it if you do. The BIOS probably marked this drive as "Drive 0" rather than "Drive 3", as you'd expect. That is a hardware issue, not the fault of GRUB.

I have not changed my drive configuration since I installed Linux. Part 1 of Drive one was configured by Dell at first, I think it has something to do with dell utility, it is only 54 MBs in size, and Windows hides it. Every time I re-installed the OS on that computer, I never messed with it because I didn't know if my computer needed something from that drive. as for the second drive, I have 2 primary partions and 6 logical partitions the drive, I configured all these under my current MCE installation. I don't have any USB drive plugged either.

I installed the OSs in this order:
Win XP MCE
Ubuntu Linux

-There is no Windows 2000

Windows XP MCE is installed on the 2nd partition of drive A
Ubuntu is installed on drive B;
sdb7 - swap
sdb8 - main install

(the rest of the partions on that drive are only for data storage)


Grub is installed on the MBR of the drive with MCE, which is set as the boot disk.


Thanks for your help.

This post has been edited by aj32: 08 February 2008 - 05:39 AM

[MorphiusFaydal]

GWatt, on 8 Feb, 2008 - 02:04 AM, said:

OK, I'm not running a linux atm, but could this be compounding the issue?

# This is a divider, added to separate the menu items below from the Debian
# ones.
title		Other operating systems:
root

He's got an empty root declaration. I don't know what that causes GRUB to do, but it certainly can't be helping.

Absolutely nothing. Just sticks an empty line (or in this case, a line of text that does nothing)

@aj32:

boot a livecd, chroot into your Ubuntu install

 # grub
grub > root (hd1,7)
grub > setup (hd0)
grub > quit
 # reboot

This'll reinstall grub with it pointing at, hopefully, the right partitions.

[manzoor]

I had the same type of error but reinstalled Ubuntu and that fixed the problem

[aj32]

I can't chroot into my existing installation, I am probably doing something wrong here, this is what i type:

chroot /media/disk/root

and it returns:
chroot: cannot change root directory to /media/disk/root: Operation not permitted



Or of course, if we can't figure this out, I could re-install Ubuntu like manzoor did...

thanks!

This post has been edited by aj32: 08 February 2008 - 02:36 PM

[GWatt]

You have to be superuser when you run chroot. try
sudo chroot /media/disk/root /bin/bash
or if that doesn't work, try this

su -
chroot /media/disk/root /bin/bash

after typing "su -" you will need to enter your root password. If you haven't set one up yet, type:
sudo passwd
and then pick a pasword.

[aj32]

now it says:

bash: /dev/null: Permision denied

[MorphiusFaydal]

Make sure you're trying to chroot into the / partition. And make sure it's actually mounted.

[aj32]

Ok, now I got it to work, but I can't mount drive 0, when I run gnome partition editor, it shows HD0 with a next to it.?

Maybe this is the problem?

Edit:
when I access the drive with file browser, a dialog shows telling me that it could not mount the drive, when I click the "Detials" button, the folowing is displayed:

 $logfile indicates unclean shutdown (0, 0) failed to mount 'dev/sda2': Operation not supported mount is denied because NTFS is marked to be in use.

Hey! I just realized something! When I try to do Grub > Setup (hd0) it returns:
"Error 17: Cannot mount volume"! Maybe that doesn't mean anything, but...!

This post has been edited by aj32: 08 February 2008 - 05:20 PM