Error: No Such Device/Grub Rescue - Can't Boot Into Anything!

[iMessedUp]

I am surprised it does not show 1,3 as one of the partitions.

We like to spend days even weeks fixing things, sometimes just for the satisfaction of fixing it.

I installed from a USB drive in 9 minutes to partitions I had already set up. It took longer to download all the updates. Sometimes reinstalling is the better choice. Just be sure to use the advanced button to install grub to the MBR of sdb or whatever the external is seen as.

http://members.iinet.net/~herman546/p28/032_install-now.png

Alright, I made sure I did that.



Still got the unknown filesystem error! I did the ls command, still no 1,3. Could it be that my NTFS partitions is in front of the ext4 and swap partition? If so, how could I move them?

This is taking a lot more than 9 minutes!

[oldfred]

Lets rerun the boot script, but frankly I do not expect to see anything. I am running out of ideas.

[iMessedUp]

I'm knee deep in gParted.

Deleted the 100MB "System Reserved" partition left over from Win 7, split the 560GB partition in half, I'm going to copy the data from the half with the data, to the half without, them reformat it to NTFS, and then try and make the linux partition at the start of the drive.

gParted has been working away at shrinking the partition in half for a good hour and a half, hope it's almost done...

EDIT: It's been 3 hours, now it says 4.5 hours left. :'(

[iMessedUp]

gParted will be finished in half an hour. It's been over 10 hours...

I've got a friends external drive that I am going to use to back up all my important stuff of the external I'm trying to boot Ubuntu on, format my entire drive in NTFS, then try this whole thing again.

I think the problem was I had a Win 7 installation on the drive in my external previously, I completely forgot about this and just deleted the Windows system files rather than format the drive. Could this have caused this mess?

Anyways, the first partition I create will be the linux partition, then I will try installing Ubuntu again. Hopefully, it's successful and then I copy all my info back to a NTFS partition, and all is good.

Question : Does the Ubuntu partition have to be the first partition?

[oldfred]

No Ubuntu does not have to have its root on any specific partition. Of the four primary or three primary and one extended with many logical partitions, windows has to boot from a primary partition.

If you ever want to install windows then it would be best to make a NTFS partition first. Some BIOS will not let you boot unless you have a boot flag on a primary partition (sda1-4) as it checks before it lets windows boot. Of course grub does not need the boot flag but it is good practice to have a boot flag on a primary partition.

[iMessedUp]

So....

I'm posting this from my Ubuntu install, on my external hard drive!

My guess on what created this monster, that caused probably close to a full 24 hours of cleanup, is I never reformatted after I sold my Windows 7 PC, but kept the hard drive, I only deleted the system files. This means that pieces of the boot loader remained, and weren't cleaned out until I formatted the entire drive. I guess the Win 7 bootloader out muscled GRUB?

Anyways, I'm posting from Ubuntu now. All that's left is to copy my files back onto the external drive. I have already made an extended partition (with NTFS) for my files, so that both Linux, and Windows PCs can read the files.

Now, I'm going to have great pleasure in pressing the solve button!

Thank you very much for all of your help oldfred!

[agentfortyseven]

I had a similiar problem too..