11.10 error: no such device: <UUID>; grub rescue>

[msapiro]

I have a 10 year old HP Pavilion 790n w/ 2GB ram and two fixed 500 GB hard drives (new about a year ago) with Windows XP installed. Unfortunately the BIOS can't see beyond 128 GiB, so that's the size it thinks the drives are.

Anyway, I installed Ubuntu 11.10 from a live CD in a dual boot alongside Windows, and I am now unable to boot the machine from the hard drive(s) I get

error: no such device: 07ef99ae-5930-45c5-873c-a66e755ae5f5

and a grub rescue> prompt.

ls gives

(hdo) (hd0,msdos2) (hd0,msdos1) (hd1) (hd1,msdos1) (fd0)

No mention of the Linux boot partition. I booted from the live CD and ran Boot-Repair which produced <http://paste.ubuntu.com/895327/> (http://paste.ubuntu.com/895327/), but the problem persists.

I also tried the solution at <https://bugs.launchpad.net/debian/+source/grub2/+bug/403408/comments/1> which didn't change things.

What can I do next?

[Quackers]

Is there an option in the bios to read large drives? It can have a couple of different names (sometimes LBA I believe). If there is turn that switch on.
If not, you can install Ubuntu using a boot partition, but that boot partition must be placed early in the drive.

EDIT Actually looking at your boot script output your Ubuntu boot files are already installed below the 128GB limit of your bios, so that should be ok.
What is the UUID given in the error message?

[msapiro]

Is there an option in the bios to read large drives? It can have a couple of different names (sometimes LBA I believe). If there is turn that switch on.
If not, you can install Ubuntu using a boot partition, but that boot partition must be placed early in the drive.


There is no option. The bios is from Nov, 2001 and there is nothing newer available from HP for this machine.



EDIT Actually looking at your boot script output your Ubuntu boot files are already installed below the 128GB limit of your bios, so that should be ok.
What is the UUID given in the error message?

The UUID is 07ef99ae-5930-45c5-873c-a66e755ae5f5 as stated in the body of the original post.. This matches the UUID from blkid.

However, this issue is mostly solved. I had earlier posted to boot.repair@gmail.com and since posting here, I received a reply from Yann suggesting to run Boot-Repair, click "Advanced options", go to the "GRUB options" tab, tick the "out-of-disk" option and apply.

That mostly solved the issue. The only remaining problem is in trying to boot Windows I get an error after selecting the Windows boot from the grub menu.


error: device format "ata0,msdos2" invalid: must be (f|h)dN where 0 <= N < 128

press any key to continue ...
but upon continuing Windows boots OK. I can live with that.

[oldfred]

Your Windows error may be related to having two boot.ini in sda2?

Window is not case sensitive so even though one has caps and the other does not, it still means in Windows they are the same??

[Quackers]

Glad to see your former problem is solved.
Not sure about the Windows problem though.

[msapiro]

Your Windows error may be related to having two boot.ini in sda2?


I tried renaming boot.ini to boot.ini.bak leaving only BOOT.INI and also renaming BOOT.INI to BOOT.INI.bak leaving only boot.ini (there were minor differences between them). There was no change in the Windows boot either way.

It seems that GRUB is looking for the partition "ata0,msdos2", and the error seems to say it should be looking for "hd0,msdos2".