[SOLVED] Grub+Ubuntu+XP and many hard drives..

[Brandon81]

Running Ubuntu on my laptop has been fantastic. I am now ready to go to my desktop with Ubuntu. I absolutely need to have XP on there as well for a few reasons. One being the lack of MS Access support that I need for school.

In any event, here's my situation, and why I am posting it here when there's tons of information available out there on dual booting Grub with Linux and XP.

I have the following hard drives, and my mboard is an ABIT IC7:
Motherboard:
SATA A 160GB
SATA B 160GB
IDE 1 320GB
IDE 2 200GB
Then I have a SATA PCI card I bought, which has the following:
SATA C 500GB
IDE 3 80GB.

The BIOS will not show the 2 drives off the PCI SATA card (obviously)

Here is the order that the drives show when I install Ubuntu:
sda 500GB
hdb 80GB
hdc 320GB
hdd 200GB
sde 160GB
sdf 160GB

I had had the 2 160GB drives on a RAID0, but raid is such a pain in the *** that I decided "I'll break down the RAID array and install XP on one 160GB drive and Ubuntu on the other! Easy!"

Not quite so easy.

Installing XP is easy, obviously. XP installs to the drive, and boots, no problem.

Here's what I've done so far:
Installed XP to SATA A
Installed Ubuntu 8.04 to SATA B using Guided, entire disk option.

Rebooting brings me directly to XP with no option (obviously) for Ubuntu.

Following some guides, I have booted to the Live CD and then run that dd options to extract the first 512 bytes of the hard drive Linux is on and extracted it to a file and then got my windows Boot.ini to point to that file. This would be my preferred method, but it doesn't work. I get disk not found errors when I go to boot to Ubuntu.

According to another guide, I then tried this:
I switched the XP and Ubuntu 160GB Drives so that the Ubuntu drive was now sde. I then reinstalled Ubuntu. This would not allow Ubuntu to boot. Would get file or disk not found errors just trying to straight boot to ubuntu.

I've booted to the LiveCD and then ran GRUB, find /boot/grub/stage1 (says hd4,0) and then run setup (hd4).

Then I can't find the /boot/grub/stage1 file anymore if I search and I get a different set of file not found/disk not found errors. I've also tried the same thing after mounting the linux drive to a folder within the live cd. I've definitely done all commands prefixing with sudo, just so no one thinks it's a permissions issue.

Basically at this point, I am pretty sure this has to do with the order that Ubuntu is listing the drives as opposed to the BIOS listing the drives, but I have absolutely no idea how to figure out what's where aside from the live cd, which is where it's coming up wrong.

I would prefer to keep all the drives connected and in the same boot order so as to avoid problems as I would assume that things would change if I disconnected everything but the Ubuntu drive, installed it, then reconnected everything. I could be wrong though.

All of the guides for more then one disk and dual booting have like 2 disks, which seems to be considerably easier. I wish there was an easier way to do this. Basically all I want is for the PC to boot, and give me an option to boot to Ubuntu and XP and having Ubuntu be the default (and load after 30sec or whatever)

One other thing I've found that I haven't specifically tried yet is this: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=179902 but this seems like it doesn't solve my problem of hard drives booting up in different orders. It doesn't seem like the 500gb and 80gb drives off the sata card should be the first two disks.

Thanks so much in advance.

EDIT: Unfortunately I am at work and this is regarding my home computer, so I wouldn't be able to try anything until late tonight or tomorrow as I have school after work today. I am sorry about that but I really wanted to get the ball rolling here and see if anyone else has had any similar experiences or good ideas for resolving this issue.

[justleen]

Ubuntu will install grub on the second drive. XP install the windows bootloader on the first drive. YOur bios is set to boot from the first drive, thus never even seeing grub.
As far as i can tell, all you need to do is make the other disk primary boot, which should give you a grub menu with XP in it..

[Brandon81]

Thanks for the quick reply!

I kind of did that, but by physically switching the SATA ports for the Windows and Linux drives, but that probably screwed up the boot order of things.

So basically, if I understand you correctly, I should set my boot order as such:

SATA A (Will be Windows Drive)
SATA B (Will be Ubuntu Drive)
200GB
320GB

Install Windows to SATA A.

Then change boot order to

SATA B
SATA A
200GB
320GB

Then install Ubuntu to SATA B

Is that right?

I don't know that that will work because I have installed Ubuntu to the 1st drive in the boot sequence, and then trying to straight boot into it without any other changes I've gotten errors, and I think it has to do with the SATA PCI card in there. I think that BIOS is considering when booting the order of drives I listed above, but then when installing it for some reason it's putting the PCI card drives first.

I will try your suggestion, and if that doesn't work I will try it with the 2 SATA PCI card drives disconnected. I have a feeling that's what I will have to do.

[justleen]

no, thats not right.

I was under the impression you already had both installed.

Normally, you should be able to
1) install xp to disk A
2) install ubuntu to disk B
3) Go!
(as in: the boot order should stay the same after installing an OS)
if, however, windowsbootloader is installed on driveA and grub is installed on driveB, then you have to switch the boot order.

If you have already changed the boot order after the installs, then you probbly have restore it to the orginal config, and reinstall grub.

edit: The number of drives really shouldnt matter, the only thing you should be concerned about are the two drive you're installing to.
All the other drives just get drive letters (xp) or mountpoint (linux assigned)

[caljohnsmith]

Usually what is most ideal in your situation is if you can change your BIOS to boot your Ubuntu drive, make sure Grub is installed to your Ubuntu drive, and then add entries in your Grub menu for booting Windows or any of your other drives. If you really don't want to change your boot order, you could install Grub to the MBR (Master Boot Record) of your Windows drive while leaving Grub's boot files on your Ubuntu drive; the big disadvantage of doing that though is if anything happens to your Ubuntu drive (like simply disconnecting it or file system problems in Ubuntu for example), then you won't be able to boot at all, not even Windows. If instead you install Grub to the MBR of your Ubuntu drive and set BIOS to boot it first on start up, you won't be touching your Windows drive, and thus you could easily boot your Windows drive should anything happen to the Ubuntu drive.

Which do you prefer to do? I can give specific instructions of how to set up either scenario if you would like help.

[Brandon81]

Thank you guys.

I've tried it as you describe. Both basic ways of setting it up result in file not found errors when trying to boot up.

I installed Ubuntu onto SATA B after installing windows on A and no go.

When booting to the Ubuntu drive, I can't boot into Ubuntu. Never have on my desktop PC. Everytime I boot up to the linux drive getting these file not found and disk not found errors.

I really believe that the BIOS loads the drives like this:

Disk 1: 320GB IDE1
Disk 2: 200GB IDE2
Disk 3: 160GB SATA1
Disk 4: 160GB SATA2

And then somehow after the boot, it then detects the drives off of the sata controller card, and somehow puts them into the disk 1 and 2 spots, so when linux is installed, grub looks to 4 when I think ** it should be looking for a different hard drive number on the initial boot.

It's all very strange.

preferably I'd like to use the windows boot loader from SATA1 and have it default to the linux option and then go into grub from there on the linux drive.

I don't really care very much how it's set up. I just need to be able to dual boot effectively, and have linux be default (do a lot of remote desktoping and want to make sure if rebooting it'll go back into Ubuntu, which will be my main OS)


Oh... and theoretically I have windows and Ubuntu installed already to both drives. I have at this point switched the SATA drives, so Windows, which was on SATA1 (sde) is now on SATA2 (sdf) and Linux is now on SATA 1 (sde)

I think the last thing I did trashed grub, as I was getting the file not found when running "find /boot/grub/stage1" in the grub menu on the live cd.

I know I'm not giving you guys a lot to work with, I'm sorry about that! I am going to try to install with the SATA controller disk drives disconnected, I think that's the answer. Then it will match the bios for the disks, I think.

[ram130]

Your bios should just give u a option to select a boot device temporarily after the boot screen(i think its f12). Use it and select the drive the ubuntu install is currently on. If that does not work, repeat the process until you see grub load. As soon as u find it, note the hard drive grub loaded from. Then reinstall grub from the live cd using the find option. Then select the drive in the bios that grub had booted from. You should be good to go.


If not....let me know

[WWSmith36]

I recommend having grub handle all you booting. So I would definitely set your ubuntu drive to be the primary boot drive. If you get the grub boot menu you are doing good.

Typically when there are many mixed drives (IDE, SCSI, SATA) on a machine you will get errors when trying to boot this is caused by the bios, grub, and kernel specifying them differently.

Grub will not boot either OS properly if the specification is menu.lst is incorrect. Fortunately if you can get to the boot screen, grub is your friend.

You instead of selecting one of the options in the menu, choose to ´e´ to edit the root parameter - you can experiment to find the right one. Or select ´c´ and enter grub CLI where you can use the find command determine the correct unbuntu boot partition. After you get into ubuntu you can fix you windows boot entry - specific the correct windows partition and using the map command as well.

Here a link to good Grub Page (it is long) so you may want to search the page for these reference: Chainloading Windows on a non-first hard disk and How to use GRUB's Command Line to investigate a computer
http://users.bigpond.net.au/hermanzo...ows_OS_entries

Hope this helps

[Brandon81]

Thank you guys again

Really excellent how quickly and easily people are helpful here. I don't know what took me so long to jump onboard the Linux train.

I am looking into a Windows installable boot loader, Acronis... ever hear of it?

I will probably give Grub another shot too. I honestly think the best bet is to disconnect the 2 hard drives off of the SATA card, because I think that's what the problem is. It has to do with what order they load in and at what point in the process. Anyway, just wanted to give an update, I am sure I'll get it working. Appreciate the help.

[TeXtonyx]

Following some guides, I have booted to the Live CD and then run that dd options to extract the first 512 bytes of the hard drive Linux is on and extracted it to a file and then got my windows Boot.ini to point to that file. This would be my preferred method, but it doesn't work. I get disk not found errors when I go to boot to Ubuntu.

TeX: Maybe you neglected to mention a crucial step. During the live cd install to
the drive, at step 7 under "Advanced" did you choose *not* hd0, which is the MBR,
but to one of the partitions displayed in the dropdown menu? That is called installing
to the boot partition. Then you copy the first 512 bytes of that partition. I think it is
a mistake to use dd to do this because it is a lot easier to make a typo. Bootpart is
free, displays the partitions, and writes the boot entry to boot.ini. From C:\ , you
would type something like: bootpart 10 ubuntusdb.bin "UbuntuSdb" <enter>
Here is a useful but not exact url:
http://forums.majorgeeks.com/showthread.php?t=108021

If you resize a partition then run Bootpart again. If you installed grub to the MBR,
then you will need to reinstall grub to the appropriate boot partition. Also I think
it is a good idea to have that grub menu.lst duplicate most of the boot options
provided by the boot.ini menu. (I didn't mean that dd wouldn't work.)