Stuck at 'no boot device' after install

[paulus333]

Today I received my brand new PC. Since I'm happy with Ubuntu 10.04 on my old PC I also wanted to install the 64 bit version of 10.04.1 on my new PC (i7 950, Intel DX58SQ, WD 2TB). No problem installing but, at restart, I get the BIOS message 'no boot device'. Tried everything, reinstalled GRUB, changed the BIOS settings to 'legacy' instead of 'native' but nothing works.

Even deleted all partitions (BIOS, LINUX data, SWAP) on the harddisk with GParted and formatted and re-installed using the entire disk. Still nothing. I definitely need help. Somebody?

[oldfred]

Welcome to the forums.

Some older BIOS (often Intel) required a boot flag on a primary partition.

Some newer systems do not use BIOS but are UEFI and require gpt partitions, or can be set to work as BIOS with MBR partitions. How is your system set up?

[paulus333]

Thanks! I've been digging through my BIOS settings and I noticed that UEFI was disabled. Didn't know what it was anyway. Perhaps I should just try this setting and see what happens.

[oldfred]

Most of us still have BIOS and MBR. I did convert one drive to gpt to learn about it and it works just fine if set up correctly with BIOS. Do not have a new motherboard with UEFI to learn about that yet.

When you say you deleted the bios partition that may have been the efi or gpt boot partition that now it is asking for.

This link says they just installed grub2 to the drive and it found the BIOS boot partition.
http://www.mail-archive.com/grub-dev.../msg12109.html
Since the BIOS Boot Partition ("bios_grub" flag set in GNU Parted) is used without a filesystem for storing GRUB 2 boot code, and since the EFI System Partition (ESP) is used by EFI with a FAT-32 filesystem for storing EFI files, the two cannot be the same partition.

MBR details including 2TiB limit and GPT link
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Master_boot_record
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UEFI
grub2 & GPT info
http://grub.enbug.org/BIOS_Boot_Partition

grub EFI
http://www.mail-archive.com/maverick.../msg01724.html

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.p...&highlight=efi

[paulus333]

My drive is GPT but that was not on purpose. No clue how that happened. I've tried a couple of things now but nothing worked. Last attempt was:

GRUB2 provides the ability to boot from GPT in both BIOS based systems and UEFI based systems. All partition defining commands remain the same ( like (hd0,8) ). Just load the part_gpt grub2 module from grub2 shell or include "insmod part_gpt" line before "set root=" line in grub.cfg file. Usually grub-probe will automatically add this module to core.img or grub.efi file if it detects the HDD to be using GPT.

Still nothing.

Also googled for 'Ubuntu' 'Intel DX58SQ', no hits apart from my threads. Am I the first one trying Ubuntu on this motherboard?

Edit: Ah, stupid me I should have googled for DX58SO instead. There are issue with this motherboard!

[paulus333]

Here's what GParted tells about partitioning:

Partition File System Mount Point Size Used Unused Flags
unallocated unallocated 1.00MiB
/dev/sda1 unknown 1.00MiB bios_grub
/dev/sda2 ext4 /media/684b7889-8bcd-4f2d-b59a-f0d1a54f7c2c 1.80TiB 31.36GiB 1.77TiB
/dev/sda3 linux-swap 17.08GiB

O.K.?

[oldfred]

That looks just like my 160GB drive (except mine is smaller). The bios_grub partition is not seen by most tools but works just fine. I had no issue booting the gpt drive, but then could not boot windows on another drive, without the extra parameters. With Maverick they have fixed that.

Are you using the MBR mode or the EFI mode?

Separate issue. Do you really just want one very large partition. I prefer several smaller partitions, both for backup size, and if every having to repair or recover it does not take forever. If you have 16GB of memory and plan on hibernating would you need 17GB of swap. With lots of memory swap is rarely if ever used. Some do not use any, but I still suggest a nominal 2GB. Only if running video editing in multiple virtual systems might you need swap.

[paulus333]

I've disabled UEFI, so I'm going for the old-fashioned approach. Tried UEFI once but that didn't help.
I know the partitions for Ubuntu are way too large but for the first install attempt it should be good enough. Can't get it to boot as it is anyway. Straight after POST it tells me there's no boot device.

[oldfred]

That sounds more like a BIOS error than a grub error. I do not know if you can even add boot flags to gpt partitions as they are not really bootable separately. I would review BIOS settings and see what is there.

[oldfred]

Lets go back and run this to confirm that the install looks ok.

Boot Info Script courtesy of forum member meierfra
Page with instructions and download:
http://bootinfoscript.sourceforge.net/
Paste results.txt, then highlight entire file and click on # in edit panel(code tags) to make it easier to read.
Or You can generate the tags first by pressing the # icon in the post's menu and then paste the contents between the generated [ code][ /code] tags.