grub frustration when installing on an external hard drive

[ghostier]

I have windows 7 and no, grub does not have an entry for windows. I think it only detects the boot from my external hard drive. I'm gonna try ms-sys now.

[mechro]

@ Herman

Off Topic

I didn't realise you posted here. Your Grub pages have been an indispensable guide over the past couple of years. Thanks.

[ghostier]

I can't install ms-sys somehow, it says that it couldn't find the package. Should I download a package from sourceforge?

[tpjk]

hey everyone!

i'm not trying to hijack this thread but i'm having pretty much the exact same problem.

i created a karmic live cd, booted from it, tried out karmic from the cd for a bit, decided i liked it enough to put it on my 16gb external usb stick/pendrive, went through the installation process without clicking the 'advanced' button in step 7 and now i can only boot if the stick is plugged in. that is what i would like to fix.

on my internal hd i'm dual booting win xp and intrepid with win as the boot partition.

here's the output of sudo fdisk -lu:

Disk /dev/sda: 250.1 GB, 250059350016 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 30401 cylinders, total 488397168 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0xc51bc51b

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sda1   *          63    81915434    40957686    7  HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda2       486287550   488392064     1052257+   c  W95 FAT32 (LBA)
/dev/sda3        81915435   183574754    50829660    5  Extended
/dev/sda4       183574755   486287549   151356397+   b  W95 FAT32
/dev/sda5        81915498   179670959    48877731   83  Linux
/dev/sda6       179671023   183574754     1951866   82  Linux swap / Solaris

Partition table entries are not in disk order

Disk /dev/sdb: 16.0 GB, 16028794368 bytes
254 heads, 63 sectors/track, 1956 cylinders, total 31306239 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x00021b0c

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sdb1   *          52    31283909    15641929   83  Linux

EDIT: does that mean that in order to be able to boot without the stick i would have to run the following: sudo ms-sys -m /dev/sda1

Here's a method you can use from Ubuntu which doesn't matter what Windows version, (after all, it's only a code to relay the boot to the boot sector), we can fix it with ms-sys.

trying to install ms-sys i got the following error:

E: Couldn't find package ms-sys

do i need to enable any special repos for this to work?


thanks herman for all of your help so far, and ghostier, i hope you'll get it to work:]

peace

[ghostier]

What problems do you get when you try to boot?

My problem was that I did a bad install of grub. By bad install I mean incomplete install (i think installing grub on external hard drive is the source of the problem) so I had to install grub manually from Live CD (you can read previous posts on this thread to follow what I did). Now, grub is successfully installed on my external hard disk (the hard disk with karmic), I still need to make my windows booting work by replacing grub with mbr.

As for you, I don't know if my problem is the same as yours. Did you install 9.10 on your 16gb drive? How come you can't boot into windows or intrepid?

[Herman]

To have GRUBII scan your disks for other operating systems and add then automatically to your GRUB Menu, you should run 'sudo grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg'.

sudo grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg

[tpjk]

What problems do you get when you try to boot?

My problem was that I did a bad install of grub. By bad install I mean incomplete install (i think installing grub on external hard drive is the source of the problem) so I had to install grub manually from Live CD (you can read previous posts on this thread to follow what I did). Now, grub is successfully installed on my external hard disk (the hard disk with karmic), I still need to make my windows booting work by replacing grub with mbr.

As for you, I don't know if my problem is the same as yours. Did you install 9.10 on your 16gb drive? How come you can't boot into windows or intrepid?

i didn't do a bad install of grub: as long as the stick is plugged in i have no problem booting into any of the systems. if i remove it and then try to boot it goes to grub-rescue right away.

[ghostier]

I've installed an early version of ms-sys because I am having trouble installing tar.gz package. And I made a windows 2000/xp/2003 master boot record. But I have windows 7, does this matter?


Just tried and it works! Posting now from windows 7

[Herman]

I can't find ms-sys in Karmic either, sorry about that, it mustn't have been included in the repositories, I don't know why not, it has always been available unti now. Sorry for the inconvenience.

There are lots of ways to change the MBR listed in my Uninstall Page.

Lets see now ...

Even if you can't boot Windows, now that your CD drive is free, you might like a nice Windows Vista/Windows 7 recovery disk, from NeoSmart, (the makers of EasyBCD), See lswest's and bodhi.zazen's thread, HOW-TO restoring XP and Vista Bootloader & Restoring GRUB

Another way, if you can boot Windows would be to go download MBRfix, from Sysint.
Download a small utility called MbrFix.exe here, http://www.sysint.no/en/Download.aspx
Read about MbrFix.exe here, http://www.sysint.no/nedlasting/mbrfix.htm
1. Paste the file to the root of drive C:
2. boot windows
3. Click 'Start'->'Run', type CMD (for a Command Prompt).
4.type: cd \ , then press 'Enter', (to change directories to the root of drive C:\
5. after the C:\> prompt: MbrFix /drive 0 fixmbr /yes

Nothing much will appear to happen, your monitor may blink slightly, that's all. You will see the plain C:\>_ prompt again. Type 'exit'.
6. reboot and see if it worked.

[tpjk]

I've installed an early version of ms-sys because I am having trouble installing tar.gz package. And I made a windows 2000/xp/2003 master boot record. But I have windows 7, does this matter?


Just tried and it works! Posting now from windows 7

congrats! so that means you can now boot from your internal hard drive without your external hd being connected?

if so, what exactly did you do?:]