A little advice for getting started?

[sarahr]

+1
And check twice with for example
sudo fdisk -lu
that you are wiping the correct drive. There is no undelete!!! And you should
run dd when booted from another drive,
for example your Ubuntu install CD/DVD/USB drive.

I just did this. Here's the output:

ubuntu@ubuntu:~$ sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda bs=1024 count=1024
1024+0 records in
1024+0 records out
1048576 bytes (1.0 MB) copied, 0.0519496 s, 20.2 MB/s
ubuntu@ubuntu:~$

[sarahr]

So I ran dd and just launched Gparted, and the disk is still showing up as 465.76 GB, meaning that Lenovo rescue partition is still there. This is what is causing all the trouble. I cannot believe I can't reformat my own hard drive because of some silly factory-installed Windows rescue crap. This is ridiculous!

[sudodus]

So I ran dd and just launched Gparted, and the disk is still showing up as 465.76 GB, meaning that Lenovo rescue partition is still there. This is what is causing all the trouble. I cannot believe I can't reformat my own hard drive because of some silly factory-installed Windows rescue crap. This is ridiculous!

It is probably the difference in units. GiB vs GB:

465.76*1.024*1.024*1.024 = 500.1

[sarahr]

Oh, jeez. Duh.

Well, I'm going to try to run the Ubuntu installer and I'll set up the disk in the install process.

I'll report back!!

[sudodus]

Good luck and welcome back

[sarahr]

Well, I'm thrilled to say that I got the disk partitioned properly and the install seem to run perfectly. I chose sda1 (/boot) for my boot loader and all seemed to go well. Now, upon reboot, I'm caught in an endless cycle of not being able to boot off the internal hard drive. The boot menu defaults to my CD, which is my first choice in my boot menu, but I think the problem must be something to do with GRUB. Any ideas on what I need to do to make sure I have a boot loader where I need to have it on the Ubuntu disk?

Almost there - thank you!!

[sudodus]

Well, I'm thrilled to say that I got the disk partitioned properly and the install seem to run perfectly. I chose sda1 (/boot) for my boot loader and all seemed to go well. Now, upon reboot, I'm caught in an endless cycle of not being able to boot off the internal hard drive. The boot menu defaults to my CD, which is my first choice in my boot menu, but I think the problem must be something to do with GRUB. Any ideas on what I need to do to make sure I have a boot loader where I need to have it on the Ubuntu disk?

Almost there - thank you!!

Did you choose any partition for / (the root file system)?

/boot can be within /, but can also be a separate partition.
Do you know where the installed root file system was written, and where /home was written?

[sarahr]

I was only prompted to select where to put the boot partition. The drive map looks like;


/boot ext2 primary
/swap logical
/ ext3 logical
/home ext3 logical

[about 20 gigs in unallocated space for a shared partition to be formatted as NTFS later]

[sarahr]

So we're still having trouble with getting a bootloader installed/functional. The problem is very similar to the one we had under Mint, running on a 12.10 base. Here is a link to that discussion:

http://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?f=90&t=120279

We are now going to attempt to get things rolling using the procedures outlined here:

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1581099

Will report back. Thanks.

[sarahr]

The commands listed in that post for people who have a separate /boot partition are failing, so I've moved on to trying to use the GUI tool referenced here:

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.p...7#post10871917

I'm told it has successfully repaired my GRUB installation, with a URL reference of:

http://paste.ubuntu.com/1487349