cleanoff xp hard drive using live cd

[pmdelage]

Can I use a liveCD of 11.4 to clean off my xp hard drive before installing Ubuntu?

[Quackers]

Welcome to UF.
If you just elect to use the whole drive for installing Ubuntu it will format the drive.
Or you can choose the "try Ubuntu" option and when the desktop loads open gparted and delete all the existing partitions.

[pmdelage]

Thanks, now the install stops and says, "No root file system is defined. Please correct this from the partitioning menu." But I can't see what to do or how to do it. PMD

[Quackers]

duplicate post!

[Quackers]

With the automated install option I don't think that should happen - or are you using the manual approach?
If the latter you need to give a mount point for the main Ubuntu partition, which is " / " for root. If you have a separate partition for /home you need to give that a mount point of /home, by clicking on the down arrow next to "mount point" and selecting them from the drop-down box.

[pmdelage]

Had to leave this for awhile. I have installed ubuntu 11.04 on Toshiba laptop hard drive, but it will not boot. I can boot it using a 9.04 livecd (often almost boots using livecd but then immediatley shuts down, but that is another story, I think. I just keep trying and finally it boots up.) Here is a screen shot, which I gather shows why it does not boot. Can someone tell me steps to take to get the bootloader in the right place. Thanks from a real noobie. Paul

[Quackers]

Please boot from the Ubuntu Live cd/usb and select "try ubuntu" then when the desktop is loaded make sure you have an internet connection and go to the site below and download the boot script. This will give you a zip file which should be extracted in the same directory as it was downloaded. This produces a folder which contains the script and a changelog file.
You then need to cd to that directory in the terminal (for example
cd Downloads/boot_info_script060 if you downloaded it to your Downloads folder). You don't need to do that if you downloaded it to your home folder.
Then enter

sudo bash boot_info_script.sh

This will produce a results.txt file in the same directory as the downloaded boot script. Please copy the contents of that file and paste them in your next post between CODE tags. For CODE tags click on New Reply (not quick reply)and then click on the # symbol in the toolbar.
This will give a full overview of your current system.
Thanks.

http://bootinfoscript.sourceforge.net/

[pmdelage]

Herewith as directed:


Boot Info Script 0.60 from 17 May 2011


============================= Boot Info Summary: ===============================

=> No boot loader is installed in the MBR of /dev/sda.

sda1: __________________________________________________ ________________________

File system: ext3
Boot sector type: -
Boot sector info:
Operating System:
Boot files: /etc/fstab

sda2: __________________________________________________ ________________________

File system: Extended Partition
Boot sector type: -
Boot sector info:

sda5: __________________________________________________ ________________________

File system: swap
Boot sector type: -
Boot sector info:

============================ Drive/Partition Info: =============================

Drive: sda __________________________________________________ ___________________

Disk /dev/sda: 20.0 GB, 20003880960 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 2432 cylinders, total 39070080 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x000f1e77

Partition Boot Start Sector End Sector # of Sectors Id System

/dev/sda1 63 37,351,124 37,351,062 83 Linux
/dev/sda2 37,351,125 39,070,079 1,718,955 5 Extended
/dev/sda5 37,351,188 39,070,079 1,718,892 82 Linux swap / Solaris


"blkid" output: __________________________________________________ ______________

Device UUID TYPE LABEL

/dev/loop0 squashfs
/dev/ramzswap0 swap
/dev/sda1 89a9b2b1-34ab-4ec5-a28f-6f2d76bcce8e ext3
/dev/sda5 fd6efa53-15f9-455d-9cb5-a8624f70bf6b swap

================================ Mount points: =================================

Device Mount_Point Type Options

/dev/loop0 /rofs squashfs (ro,noatime)
/dev/sr0 /cdrom iso9660 (ro,noatime)


=============================== sda1/etc/fstab: ================================

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
# /etc/fstab: static file system information.
#
# Use 'vol_id --uuid' to print the universally unique identifier for a
# device; this may be used with UUID= as a more robust way to name devices
# that works even if disks are added and removed. See fstab(5).
#
# <file system> <mount point> <type> <options> <dump> <pass>
proc /proc proc defaults 0 0
# / was on /dev/sda1 during installation
UUID=89a9b2b1-34ab-4ec5-a28f-6f2d76bcce8e / ext3 relatime,errors=remount-ro 0 1
# swap was on /dev/sda5 during installation
UUID=fd6efa53-15f9-455d-9cb5-a8624f70bf6b none swap sw 0 0
/dev/scd0 /media/cdrom0 udf,iso9660 user,noauto,exec,utf8 0 0
/dev/fd0 /media/floppy0 auto rw,user,noauto,exec,utf8 0 0
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

[Quackers]

Ubuntu may not be properly installed. There are no grub files present in the sda1 partition and there should be and no operating system type is shown.
I would re-install again using the same partitions (just use them again, choosing to format the root partition).