sides
April 17th, 2009, 04:23 AM
Hi all, I am trying to install Ubuntu 8.10 and can't boot when I remove the installation cd. I just get a blinking _ cursor in the upper left hand corner of the screen.
Here is a description of my system and the steps I have taken so far.
Asus A8n-Sli Premium motherboard - AMD X2 4400+ - 2 G ram
SATA 1 - WD 150G drive Part 1 - 130G (XP Pro) Part 2 - 20G (Leopard)
SATA 2 - WD 500G drive
IDE 1 Master - WD 250G drive
IDE 2 Master - Plextor DVD burner
USB - WD My Book
USB - WD 120G drive in an external enclosure Part 1 (sdd1) - 17G ext3 Ubuntu mounted to / Part 2 (sdd2) - 3G Linux Swap Part 3 (sdd3) - 100G Fat32
On my first attempt, I created my Ubuntu partitions with a gparted boot cd. My installation ran smoothly, though I accidentally installed Grub on my 500g SATA drive. I was ok with that because I planned on using the XP bootloader to select my os (I currently use it to dual boot XP and Leopard). After my install, I rebooted to the GParted CD and used the steps at http://www.matthewjmiller.net/howtos/dual-boot-linux-and-windows/ to set up my boot.ini.
I rebooted, selected Ubuntu and promptly got a rapidly flashing _ cursor in the upper left hand corner of the screen. My next step was to go in my Bios and set the External 120G USB drive as my boot drive. I got an error that the operating sytem wasn't found. I changed my boot order to boot to the 500g SATA drive to run Grub. Grub gave the "Grub Loading stage1.5." message, then halted with error 17 followed by the blinking _ cursor.
I booted again to GParted and checked/fixed the filesystem on /dev/sdd1 (the first partition on the external drive). I also noticed that /dev/sdd3 (the fat32 partition) had the boot flag set. I changed the boot flag to /dev/sdd1, set the external 120G to my boot drive in the bios and got the same error loading operating system messagea as before.
At this point I tried installing one more time, mounting /dev/sdd1 to / and /dev/sdd2 to linux swap, formatted, installed, and didn't install grub this time. I got exactly the same results as the first attempt and I am out of ideas.
Any help at all would be greatly appreciated.
On a side note, I can't find info on how to remove grub from a non-boot drive. Can I boot to XP recovery mode and fixmbr on a drive other than my boot drive? It isn't a huge deal I guess since I don't ever plan on booting to the 500G SATA drive but if there is an easy way to remove it, I'd rather clean up after myself.
Thanks again.
Here is a description of my system and the steps I have taken so far.
Asus A8n-Sli Premium motherboard - AMD X2 4400+ - 2 G ram
SATA 1 - WD 150G drive Part 1 - 130G (XP Pro) Part 2 - 20G (Leopard)
SATA 2 - WD 500G drive
IDE 1 Master - WD 250G drive
IDE 2 Master - Plextor DVD burner
USB - WD My Book
USB - WD 120G drive in an external enclosure Part 1 (sdd1) - 17G ext3 Ubuntu mounted to / Part 2 (sdd2) - 3G Linux Swap Part 3 (sdd3) - 100G Fat32
On my first attempt, I created my Ubuntu partitions with a gparted boot cd. My installation ran smoothly, though I accidentally installed Grub on my 500g SATA drive. I was ok with that because I planned on using the XP bootloader to select my os (I currently use it to dual boot XP and Leopard). After my install, I rebooted to the GParted CD and used the steps at http://www.matthewjmiller.net/howtos/dual-boot-linux-and-windows/ to set up my boot.ini.
I rebooted, selected Ubuntu and promptly got a rapidly flashing _ cursor in the upper left hand corner of the screen. My next step was to go in my Bios and set the External 120G USB drive as my boot drive. I got an error that the operating sytem wasn't found. I changed my boot order to boot to the 500g SATA drive to run Grub. Grub gave the "Grub Loading stage1.5." message, then halted with error 17 followed by the blinking _ cursor.
I booted again to GParted and checked/fixed the filesystem on /dev/sdd1 (the first partition on the external drive). I also noticed that /dev/sdd3 (the fat32 partition) had the boot flag set. I changed the boot flag to /dev/sdd1, set the external 120G to my boot drive in the bios and got the same error loading operating system messagea as before.
At this point I tried installing one more time, mounting /dev/sdd1 to / and /dev/sdd2 to linux swap, formatted, installed, and didn't install grub this time. I got exactly the same results as the first attempt and I am out of ideas.
Any help at all would be greatly appreciated.
On a side note, I can't find info on how to remove grub from a non-boot drive. Can I boot to XP recovery mode and fixmbr on a drive other than my boot drive? It isn't a huge deal I guess since I don't ever plan on booting to the 500G SATA drive but if there is an easy way to remove it, I'd rather clean up after myself.
Thanks again.