GRUB2 doesn't show up after Ubuntu installation

[ameseisch]

I had a similar problem with GRUB on the s205. installed 11.04 and after restart it just went right back into windows. like nothing had changed but the hard drive was smaller for the windows partition. Ended up wiping the hard drive and reinstalling. now on boot I have to hit 's' to skip it trying to mount a missing drive/partition. could that be related to something getting mistakenly installed on the usb drive as mentioned earlier? any way to get rid of that?

Thanks for the tip on the wifi. That had me a little stuck.

I still had some difficulty getting it going but the modprobe -r acer_wmi and rfkill put me on the right track. rfkill wasn't removing the hard block so trued reboot, but then the acer_wmi was back, unblocked all again and modprobe -r acer_wmi again and that did it. not sure how this is going to work down the line though. it would be nice to not have to do that on each boot.

UPDATE: The acer_wmi kept coming back, so added it to /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist-modem.conf and that solved that. However, my hardware switch is now consistently detected as off, and rfkill unblock does nothing for that problem. I know the wifi works fine if I can get past this.

I found some leads at http://askubuntu.com/questions/9816/...get-it-working but so far nothing is working. Any ideas?

[rwh]

I wrote a blog post on how I got Ubuntu 11.04 running on my s205... it shows one way (probably not the best way) to downgrade to GRUB legacy, and two possible solutions for the wifi.

Installing Ubuntu on the lenovo ideapad S205

[balaoko]

Thanks rwh. I tried you method but could not pass step 6. My S205 has ubuntu only, with 50GB ubuntu (sda1) and rest disk unpartitioned. since I don't have a partition /boot, I used 'mount --bind /boot ./boot' instead of 'mount /dev/sda6 ./boot' in step 5. At step 6, 'update-grub' was successful but 'grub-install /dev/sda1' failed: 'could not find device for /boot'. Is it possible that I don't need the /boot partition? Thanks a lot.

I wrote a blog post on how I got Ubuntu 11.04 running on my s205... it shows one way (probably not the best way) to downgrade to GRUB legacy, and two possible solutions for the wifi.

Installing Ubuntu on the lenovo ideapad S205

[rwh]

Hi balaoko,

Here's step six, for reference:

6. Follow these instructions to download to grub legacy: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Gr...ing%20GRUB%202
- apt-get update ; apt-get install grub
- update-grub
- yes to generate list
- grub-install /dev/sda6
We’ve now installed grub legacy in /dev/sda6, which is our ubuntu /boot partition. We now need to get the Windows 7 bootloader to chain-boot this. We do this using a little utility called EasyBCD, though it’s possible to modify the Windows config files manually if you prefer.

There are a couple of problems I can see with your setup. First, if you don't have a boot partition, then all of the files that would normally have appeared in the /boot partition will now just live in /boot on the root partition. So you don't need to use the mount --bind step that you mention.

The other problem is that, as far as I can tell by googling, grub-legacy has no support for ext4 partitions. That's one reason for having a separate /boot partition formatted ext2.

[balaoko]

Thanks rwh for your generous and prompt help. It sounds clear I have to have a separate /boot partition for a moment.

[balaoko]

Thanks rwh for your generous and prompt help. It sounds clear I have to have a separate /boot partition for a moment.

Still failed after using /boot partition. The screen display:
"Intel UNDI, PXE-2.1 (build 083)
Copyright (C) 1997-2000 Intel Corporation

This product is covered by one or more of the following patents: blah blah

Realtek PCIe FE Family Controller series v1.23 (07/28/10)
PXE-E61: Media test failure, check cable

PXE-M0F: Exiting PXE ROM"

It sounds like the disk cable is loose after google it. However I can create folder in my HD after booting using my USB stick. So I don't think the connection to the HD is a problem.

What should I do now? Thanks.

[balaoko]

One more thing. When I tried to purge grub-pc, it is not installed. Instead, grub-efi is installed which was removed. Thanks.

[balaoko]

Finally md36's method worked. I didn't use a separate /boot partition. In the last step, update-grub, "yes" to create menu.lst failed. So I manually created an empty menu.lst, which was later updated by running update-grub again. After reboot. Bingo!

z.tutto's method makes wireless work, but is apparently much slow. I used the same method when booting with live CD, and it was very fast, though.

Anyway, finally I can use it as I wanted. Thanks all for your useful information that made it happen