Debian Installation :: How To Copy USB Key Boot Sector To HD
Aug 20, 2010
I just installed squeeze from a usb key. Installation went flawlessly but now I need the usb key to boot. Nothing happens if I let the bios boot from the HD or if I force it to do so. When it boot up from the usb key, the HD is read and the boot up sequence continues. Grub seems to be installed in /boot/grub. I imagine that I have to copy the usb key boot sector to the HD but how?
I have a 160GB harddrive which I installed a F12, would like to upgrade to a bigger drive, but I hate to have to re-install everything.
Recommend a good disk copy utility? The utility should be able to not only copy files, but boot sector and everything. So I just need to make a copy, change my BIOS to boot from the new drive and run everything as before.
I had ubuntu studio installed ( for the record I hated it and every ubuntu flavor I have ever used. ) After backing off all the stuff from my home dir I started to install testing from a dvd. ( Is there a net install for testing? I couldn't find it) Don't ask me how it happened but some times I would have two grub graphical boot menus. One would chain to the other. I suspect that happened from one of the very friendly updates ubuntu did. Well when I tried to install testing I got a red screen telling me that grub wouldn't install so I tried lilo. Well it wouldn't install either. Back in the old days when I was a slackware guy installing from a stack of floppies I had a trick to wipe out any boot loaders or other stuff that gave me a problem. I would dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/<drive info such as hda with no partition number> .
This would write zeros over the drive and it would look like a new drive. So I did this trick. But still no joy ( this is a clue, dd was also thinking that the beginning of the drive was after the boot sector.). I suspected that the installer wasn't doing it's job right. So I got a PCLinuxOs disk and started that installer. The PCLinuOS installer has a cutesy visual bar that shows the partitions. Well sure enough the boot sector showed as blank. This was what the Debian installer had done. It left the boot sector blank and tried to install the boot loader right after it. This won't work. Now I consider when some version of Linux falls on it's face and another version does it right that the version that fell on it's face has a problem.
One might even call it a bug. But I don't know what to do about it. I don't think the problem is with grub or the installer itself. I think how the drive was looked at was faulty. That's why dd didn't blankout the boot sector. So what do I do to help get the Deb people to fix this? The more I think about it the more I think the problem is with udev ( what a surprise) I think this because I suspect dd looks to the info set out by udev to find the beginning of the drive.
I currently have XP installed on a NetBook (Samsung NC10), and would like to run Fedora on it. I'm currently looking at putting Fedora onto a flash memory card to test it works OK on the hardware, before installing it to the hard disk. The problem I've got is that the boot sector is occupied by WDE software (TrueCrypt). Will this pose a problem for dual-booting XP with Fedora, or will GRUB move the boot loader in the usual way?
I'm running 9.10 off of a 4 GiB CF card. I keep running into space issues with updates, so I purchased an 8 GiB replacement card. I've cloned the 4 GiB card to a .IMG file using DD.I've then copied the 4 GiB image back to the 8 GiB card using the Ubuntu startup disk creator program. Once done, I'm able to properly boot off of the new 8 GiB clone.Unfortunately, the clone ends up with 3.67 GiB of unallocated space at the end *see attached). I tried deleting the "extended" partition that the swap is located at after booting from a Live CD and the system was unable to boot after this. I was thinking that I would delete the swap entirely and create a swap file after I merged the existing partitions, but I was unable to do this.
best way to do this (e.g. get one large 8 GiB partition with my old image on it)? I still have the original untouched 4 GiB card and also have an external CF drive if I need to redo the cloning. I've also used Clonezilla before, so perhaps there's a way to do this that allow me to grow the image as it's being cloned.
I have a rather puzzling error. I recently purchased an usb external hard drive with the intent of installing Ubuntu on it. I have had great success with installing various linux flavors on usb thumb drives but I need a little larger space for engineering applications that I use. Anyway, I removed my laptop's internal hard drive and installed ubuntu 9.10 on a recently formated external hard drive. Everything worked fine at first. Upon restarting I get an error that says "no boot sector" and it asks to hit either f1 to retry. When I hit retry, Grub loads most of the time. Occasionally it does not work. Is Grub just not installing correctly? I searched for this error but I found nothing that directly applied.
My old Dell Inspiron 9300's CD Rom is no longer working. I've written the files to my 8GB USB device, and attempted to boot from it. Whenever I try, I get this "No boot sector on USB device". I'm also using Mac OS X to make the USB drive.
I am trying to make small kernel. I have written many programs and produce many .bin and .o files but what I want that to load every file from a specific location in specific sectors but don't know how to do that in linux , in dos same can be done by debug command.If It is not possible to achieve the specific location criterion please tell me how can I just copy many files serially to a floppy image.I have another question that if files are copied in floppy. How could I know in which sector the file has been loaded in floppy so that I can retrieve them by BIOS interrupt INT13.
I installed Fedora 15 on a primary partition and expected the install to create a partition boot sector, but it didn't. Did I do something wrong or is this not supported?
I am a complete noob at this and I need a hand. I was about to throw my computer out of the window when I decided to throw the windows out of the computer so to speak. So, I downloaded Ubuntu 10.10 and tried to install. I had a grub rescue after the installation (file system unknown), which I have seen discussed here. Being the noob that I am I decided to try 10.04 because it said it had full support. With this install I get a similar error during installation: grub cannot be installed in boot sector.
So, basically there is an issue with grub and the boot sector. I checked in my BIOS options to see if there was an option that prevented the writing of a boot sector or something, but I have not been able something like that. So, I am wondering if it is possible that Ubuntu does not really erase/format the selected disks or something, leaving any difficulty there.
Does anybody know? Or better yet: what exactly do I need to do a manual grub install?
Been away from linux for a few years thaught id come back and give it a try again. I have Win7 on sda and installed 11.4 Ubuntu on sdb. Grub2 Over wrote the boot sector for windows so windows wouldnt show in the boot menu. I repaired that after some research and then tried it again with 10.4 LTS version of Ubuntu. Same thing. Now I've fixed windows boot sector a second time and im ready for round 3. Any hints on how to get grub2 to boot both OS's? Ubuntu 10.4 is still on sdb I think I should just need to re-install grub2 But how to do it without Killing the windows boot sector?
I have a toshiba notebook with Windows XP and Ubuntu studio. I removed Ubuntu partitions with the idea to install classic Ubuntu, but... grub don't recognize Windows to boot. I formatted the hard disk as slave from another PC. I installed Windows again trying to delete the grub, but, it is already there. I am trying to repair grub from Windows with: FIXBOOT, FIXMBR, fdisk /mbr from MS DOS, but that is not working.
Any suggestions: - To delete the hard disk complete and start again everything. (deleting grub also) or - To repair boot sector for Windows
I tried to help my friend install Ubuntu 10.04 side-by-side with Windows XP on his Acer Aspire One netbook.Unfortunately, the installation process came to a standstill and it quit due to "unexpected errors". The second time I started the installation, I realized that the option for installing side by side was gone and that I could not mount the C: partition on Ubuntu. The error message is listed below:====================BEGIN ERROR MESSAGE======================Error mounting: mount exited with exit code 12: Failed to read last sector (299982847): Invalid argument
HINTS: Either the volume is a RAID/LDM but it wasn't setup yet, or it was not setup correctly (e.g. by not using mdadm --build ...), or a wrong device is tried to be mounted,
when i try to boot the 11.04 64-bit alternate.iso i get the following message, after it says that isolinux blabla is loaded: EDD: Error 8000 reading sector 2855 and when i remove the cd it says: gfx.c32: not a COM32R imageand then there is a grub-shell.
I am trying to install Ubuntu to an external usb hard drive (WD Elements SE). I am also choosing to install the grub bootloader to this disk (/dev/sdb) because I do not want anything modified on the internal drive. The installation appears to go okay, but when I try to boot to the usb drive, I get the error, "no boot sector on usb device" and it immediately falls back to my interal drive. I have tried this installation with both 10.10 (amd64) and 11.04 (amd64). How can I fix this?
upon adding the installed VL on the existing LILO.. (btw i have not installed its LILO on the installation setup) since i know that i will just add it to the "existing" LILO the error above arises upon doing the lilo run command.$adding Vector6.0 etc.FATAL : Boot sector of /dev/hdc13 doesn't have a boot signature.i have tagged the /dev/hdc13 bootable via CFDISK. but same problem arises..
Here's the set up. 1. Got an EXISTING LILO... VL 5.8 (/dev/hdc3) 2. Installed VL6.0 and installed its own lilo on Boot sector (/dev/hdc13) 3. Everytime I choose VL6.0 in my existing LILO (/dev/hdc3) it still goes to VL6.0's LILO. The question is, how can I remove the VL6.0 so if i choose this on my existing lILO. It will just boot straight.
VL6.0 LILO: root:# cat /etc/lilo.conf # LILO configuration file # generated by 'liloconfig' # Start LILO global section boot = /dev/hdc13 #default = linux #compact #prompt #timeout = 0 .....
The boot sector somehow got messed up on a friends computer while updating. I used to know how to do it with the old version, but now that they've updated it and changed everything , how do you repair the boot sector from a live-CD with Grub 2?
I recently installed 11.3 on an external drive. After adding some software in yast (searched Kernel and checked every option), I was prompted to reboot but the no boot sector found error came up. Tried reinstalling with the same result. Grub is boot loader
I'm writing a C program that reads the boot sector of a USB disk. (it is mounted as /dev/sda1). I'm able to read the sector, by the calls code...
The problem is when I wish to write. I use the call: bytesWrite = write(fd, buf, 512) The 'write' returns the value of 512, which looks as if the write was successful, yet when I read again the /dev/sda1 device, I see that no writing was actually made.
Can anybody tell me what do I need to do in order to allow an actual write to the device?
On Windows OS, I can create Debian UEFI USB boot by mount Debian ISO and directly copy content of ISO to USB FAT32. On Debian OS, When I mount the debian iso and directly copy content of iso to usb fat32, I keep getting this error: "Filesystem does not support symbolic links".I choose to skip all, the copy operation continue but USB can't boot.
Question: How to create Debian USB UEFI boot by copying content of iso file directly to fat32 usb on Debian OS?My OS: Debian Jessie RC1.The ISO file: debian-jessie-DI-rc1-amd64-DVD-1.iso URL....
I run 64 bit ubuntu 9.10. I recently rebooted my computer with a flash drive plugged into a USB port. My question is, could I have got a boot sector virus because of this? What are the symptoms of a boot sector infection? After the incident, I scanned the flash drive with clamav and it didn't detect any viruses. Also, in the BIOS, the hard drive is higher up in the boot sequence than USB mass storage drives. These two things suggest to me that a boot sector virus is improbable. But, recently, when I tried to boot into ubuntu, I got an error message saying that /dev/disk/uuid<some characters here> didn't exist.
Is this a symptom of a boot sector virus? So, I ended up re-installing ubuntu and I believe grub was written to the MBR. Will this have erased any boot sector viruses that were on my system? Can a boot-sector virus affect linux too? How can I check to see if I have a boot-sector infection? I also have windows xp on my computer. For some reason, windows xp isn't letting me install any updates, but this has been going on for since before the above incident with the flash drive and therefore I don't think that is due to a boot sector virus.
I was using the disk utility on Ubuntu 10.04 and wanted to make by 500GB external NTFS formatted USB drive into 1 x 50GB FAT32 and 1 x 450GB NTFS. I clicked the option that said format or create a partition and it basically wiped the whole thing in a split second leaving me with 500GB of seemingly empty space. Obviously the files are still there but I cannot boot the drive to view anything. I have downloaded testdisk, but don't know how to use it, but I am sure there is a relatively simple solution here. I am currently repairing the boot sector of the drive as Test Disk showed the drive as "no type" i.e. not FAT/NTFS/ext4 etc., but shows the correct amount of used space though, but I cannot view anything err go, I cannot use the undelete command as yet.
I have three disk in my system. One SATA (250GB) and two SCSI (73GB) disks. The Two SCSI disks were installed originally and RHEL3 is installed on it. The SATA disk is installed a few years later with RHEL5. As you can see below, the boot sector is still on one of the SCSI disks (sdb1).
The project was an update of a cluttered dual boot ubuntu/XP laptop to ubuntu 10.10. For work, I sometimes need Windows, regrettably some software needs Explorer or indeed W$ itself to operate.Grub 2 still seems buggy, install was fixed by
Code: sudo mount /dev/sda6 /mnt sudo grub-install --root-directory=/mnt/ /dev/sda
I am converting over to linux ubuntu 11.04, and I have used it for a week, love it. I installed an old 30gb HDD in order to install it ubuntu to try it out. Now I want to erase my primary windows XP drive and reformat to ext4, just like linux. Is there any prog or method that will make a perfect copy of what I have on my current drive ubuntu and put it on the newly formatted drive primary, so that it can boot ubuntu will all of the stuff I have on it right now?