Not so much asking for advice just logging my experience maybe it will help someone. My scenario I have a single 500GB hard drive.
Installed Windows Vista on first 80GB
Installed Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala) on next 25GB
4GB Swap
Remainder as NTFS storage
Installed GAG as boot loader (love this program). Vista started fine. However when I chose Ubuntu from the GAG boot menu I would get a message "sector boot not found or invalid". Hmmm I had done this before with a previous version of Ubuntu. I figured it was something with GRUB not being configured correctly.
I booted using the Ubuntu LiveCD and tried to reinstall grub. I guess 9.10 uses grub2 which I kept getting error messages and could find no one online doing what I was trying to do. grub2 was frustrating me. So I uninstalled grub2 and reinstalled grub as follows (this is from memory):
Boot Ubuntu LiveCD
Open Terminal
In terminal:
sudo -i
fdisk -l (to find out which partition ubuntu was installed)
mount /dev/sda5 /media/root
mount --bind /dev /media/root/dev
mount --bind /proc /media/root/proc
chroot /media/root su
apt-get purge grub2 grub-pc
apt-get update
apt-get install grub
grub
At grub prompt:
find /boot/grub/stage1
root (hd0,4)
setup (hd0,4)
quit
Rebooted. All is well. Vista and Ubuntu can now start from GAG. Key points:
-I couldn't get apt-get install grub to work. It would complain something about no installation candidate and I discovered I had to do apt-get update
-For grub, most instructions tell you to do "setup (hd0)" but for using GAG you need to do "setup (hd0,4)" replacing 4 with your partition number, because you want GAG in the MBR not grub
Had to post because I wish I had this post when I was trying to get this to work for hours.
Bookmarks