12.04 upgrade, can't boot XP from GRUB

[krismcb]

Hi there, I'm a bit of a beginner with ubuntu so excuse lack of technical jargon.

Basically the story is I upgraded to 12.04

Afterwards when I boot the PC, I get a black and white grub and anything I select gives me an error -
error: no such partition

I followed some help on the internet by downloading GRUB2 iso and burining it to CD.

I go into my BIOS to select the cd/dvd drive to be the 1st boot selection and surprise its not there.
The only device my bios recognizes is the HDD that ubuntu is installed on.
It doesn't recognize the 2nd HDD that WinXP is installed on.
Out of curiosity I disconnect the WinXP HDD and upon another boot into BIOS,
It now sees the cd/dvd drive as well as ubuntu HDD... Why is this?!

Carrying on....

I boot from my cd/dvd drive and run the grub2 bootloader until I manage to boot into Ubuntu again.

From here I installed the boot repair and ran the recommended repair.

It tells me to boot again so I do, when the PC is shutting down the screen goes black with a lot of white code
it scrolls down once or twice then just freezes there. So far its hanging there for around 15mins now....

Also at one point when I was in Ubuntu running other updates I was prompted to select between two locations for the grub to be installed,
One location was on the HDD that ubuntu is installed on and the other was /sda1/ and I always remember when I selected WinXp from grub, that beside it it said /sda1
I choose both selections to be sure but it froze up on me...

Any help at all would be perfect. Thanks

[oldfred]

Welcome to the forums.

If you installed grub to the Windows partition you may have overwritten essential Windows boot code. NTFS keeps Windows boot code in the partition boot sector or PBR. It can be easily repaired if you only did it once, but best if we confirm first.

Post link from this Boot-Info report. Do not run any repairs yet.

Boot Repair -Also handles LVM, GPT and separate /boot.:
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Boot-Repair
You can repair many boot issues with this or 'Create BootInfo' report (Other Options) & post the link it creates, so we can see your exact configuration.

[krismcb]

Thanks for your reply Fred.

I will post the link for the boot info later but I think I may have already ran the boot repair...

But we will see when I post up the link what situation I am in.

[krismcb]

Hello again, I have put the links in of the boot info.

There are two because I tried it twice...

Now is when you tell me I have done too much and can't be fixed :/

http://paste.ubuntu.com/1032311/
http://paste.ubuntu.com/1032383/

Just some more info if this helps -

The 2nd HDD in question that isn't being detected, I have disconnected it from my computer and connected it to a USB to SATA device and hooked it up to my laptop to try and retrieve some files from it. The HDD powers on and makes noises but doesn't want to communicate with laptop. (Drivers are installed)

This device has worked before ok.. now I'm slightly worried that I can't access files from this HDD.

Thanks in advance

[crownchip]

Is it possible that your winxp and cd drive are both jumpered to master or slave respectively?

[krismcb]

I haven't changed any jumpers since the day I got my PC and since I have been dual booting I haven't changed anything and its been running smooth until the 12.04 upgrade...

After the upgrade I couldn't dual boot winxp so I booted into BIOS and found the other HDD and choose to boot from it first which somehow let me into winxp for a day or two and things were going ok now the BIOS doesn't detect it anymore...

WinXp recovery CD doesn't detect it or a winxp installation.

I'm very confused!

[oldfred]

Boot script looks like it should boot.

You do have 3 swaps. Did you install multiple times?

Windows will only boot from an internal drive. It knows if it is external and will not work. But Ubuntu should see the external and let you copy files.

If BIOS stopped seeing the drive when it was internal, neither Windows nor Ubuntu would see it. That may be a hard drive failure. Then the USB would not work either.

When drive was internal did you use Disk Utility and check hard drive status unde Smart Data? It can run a lot of tests, but all I know is green is good.

[YannBuntu]

Hi
As the Ubuntu partition is very big (it ends after the first 137GB of the drive), you may need to reduce it or use the "ATA disk" option.
See http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1998257

[krismcb]

No I don't think I installed multiple times, just installed Ubuntu like 6-10months ago and upgraded once before and then now to 12.04

No I didn't do disk utility, I will try that and see what it detects. But if its not detected on BIOS.. chances are it wont be found on disk utility right?

I don't understand how I could of got a hard drive failure from all of this, upgrading software etc.

The drive isn't dead, sounds healthy.

Now my main concern is just being able to access this HDD for some files. And no Ubuntu doesn't see the drive its its connected externally. There must be some way!?

Thanks for help so far. I will try some more things tonight.