General :: PC Wouldn't Boot After Deleting Hard Drive Contents?
Mar 10, 2010
I have Intel Pentium3 motherboard model 845GVSR with 40 GB Hard Drive, DVD/CD ROM and 4 USB slots but no Floppy Drive.My PC was working fine until I deleted the contents of hard drive accidentally using trial version of killer software.I ried to install Linux by making a boot-able CD, but it did not work.Then i tried to make a boot-able USB using Universal Notebook Installer, it did not work either. I just get the Error " Error loading operating system.Then I tried a free software from net by the name James Format Tools - DOS on USB. Using this computer did boot but DOS did not install and I got the error message "invalid drive specification".I understand that now I will have to write boot sector afresh and will have to Format the hard drive,, but how to do this as all my attempts to get to the hard drive failed
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Apr 26, 2011
I downloaded Ubuntu 10.10 onto my external hard drive yesterday for use in an dead laptop. Hard drive on the laptop is dead and has no operating system. Downloaded the iso for 10.10, as well as the Universal USB Installer. Everything went well, and Ubuntu started up and loaded onto the laptop. I was so thrilled to have my old laptop working again! (it's much better than the netbook I'm on right now)
Restarted Ubuntu after creating a partition on my external hard drive, and it wouldn't restart. So, I went back to my netbook and reformatted the hard drive to factory specs, and started the process over again. Now, when I try to boot the old laptop from the hard drive I get a message that says, "Multiple Active Partitions" and it won't boot from the external hard drive.
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Apr 10, 2011
I'm trying to get my work's infrastructure built at home before I go up there and show the boss. It is as follows: VMware esxi installed on the server with:
Windows server 2008
Ubuntu 10.04 server
I've got VMware installed. And I have spent the past 7 hours trying to figure out how to manage it. I found out that vsphere has not nor will ever be supported for Linux; which was my first problem.
Second Problem So I had to dig around for a spare Windows 7 dvd. To my UN-surprise it blue screened before it even got to the Windows installer.
Third Problem So I dug around for my Windows XP disc. Wouldn't find my sata hard drive and I wasn't about to dig around for a floppy drive and disk, in order to install it.
Fourth Problem I remembered that I had a dual boot of Windows 7 downstairs and proceeded to download and install vsphere. It wouldn't install because of some updates that needed to be installed. I installed them and got vsphere installed as well. However upon connecting to my vmware esxi, there was yet another error that had to do with some update. I found out that the error had been existent since 2009 and for some reason NO ONE at VMware has fixed it....
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May 5, 2011
I've been using the command
Code:
dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb
to copy my hard drives contents completely to another hard drive.However I need a way to copy just the files on one partition. I don't want the entire partition copied, just the files. I need the code to output them in to an ISO,
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Feb 24, 2010
I have an Acer Aspire One running Ubuntu and IOmega External USB Hard Drive 250GB to make up for the 16GB on the netbook. both have been running fine untilRecently I had the Iomega plugged into a Windows XP Laptop which froze, I disconnected the Iomega and switched off the Laptop and rebooted, when I re plugged in the Iomega It failed to display any Items after a little bit of time and one or two shutdowns the Iomega worked fine on the XPHowever when I plug the Iomega into the Netbook it appears under Files and folders but when I open it it just shows me a blank white screen.
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Jun 5, 2010
Recently, Ubuntu was doing a standard update. It got stuck in some kind of strange loop. So i put the boot disk in cleared the master drive and reinstalled ububtu 10.4. I have a backup 500gb drive that use to keep the contents of my important information for my fileserver. After the completed install and found the backup drive STILL named "FILESERVER" and still has my folders aka: our pictures, our music, and our video. I opened them up and they're all empty. Am I missing some informaton? I swear i didn't format the drive. I couldn't have since the folders are still there. Where are all my files at?
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Mar 6, 2010
I have a Toshiba laptop with BIOS that will not recognize USB as a boot medium (I have purchased two USB 'thumb' drives with Distro's that do boot but the BIOS see them as HDD devices!)I did manage to install and boot a distro from the USB HD but ended up with the USB drive having to be connected' to select any of the OS partions, to boot anything.I do realize that somehow, when installing the new distro on the USB drive, I changed the GRUB configuration to be on the USB drive which obviously I did not want, so can
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Nov 1, 2010
I'm trying out puppy linux, as I have an old system, and the new Ubuntus do not work on it.
Anyway,I cannot boot from my hard drive but only from the floppy.I'm just not too keen on always booting from the floppy.
Here is the Menu.ls file:
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Oct 7, 2010
Im assuming there is a simple answer for this but I have yet to find it in forums. I have 2 partitions mounted on my ubuntu desktop, one is Windows C: drive labeled "Core" and the other is D: drive labeled "Reserve" but for some reason I have a second Windows folder on my desktop, when I attempted to delete it it began to delete the Windows files as well, one forum said to right click and "remove from desktop" but this option isnt in the menu. How can I just delete the folder?
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Dec 28, 2010
Background information: The hardware is an iMac. I had Ubuntu 10.10 and Mac OS X.... Something. That part doesn't matter. The Mac OS is still working....
So... I had everything set up, and I was happy to start my life getting used to Linux and learning all about a new operating system and how to use it and whatnot. I wanted to change my username, though, because when I was setting up my account, I didn't have a mouse and weird things were happening when I tried to change my username at the time. So I looked up on the internet (a very wonderful thing) how to change my username. I found that it required root access. I knew that I shouldn't have tried it because I was, and still am, so inexperienced. Then I went against my better judgement and f'ed up the system. Happy days, right? I couldn't do anything on Ubuntu anymore at that point. I had kind of wanted to do a clean install of Ubuntu at that point anyway, so that's what I decided to do. The mistake came when I decided to try to do it on my own instead of using the wonderful invention that is the internet to figure it out. So I went onto my Mac OS to erase the partitions I was using for Linux. So everything was fine until I tried to boot from my USB to reinstall Ubuntu. It keeps taking me to the command line that says "error: unknown filesystem. [return] grub rescue>" The exact same thing happens when I try to boot from the hard drive. I was really curious why it's not actually booting anything from the USB drive, because I shouldn't need the hard drive to do that, correct? I tested the USB on my Windows netbook, and it worked as it was supposed to work. I was able to try Ubuntu just fine. Then I put Ubuntu 10.04 on my flash drive. It also wouldn't boot on my Mac. Does anybody have any advice for how to get Linux working on my Mac again? I'm really sick of Mac OS and would prefer using Linux.
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Jun 22, 2010
Something caused my Fedora 11 system to reboot this evening, only it keeps trying to boot from a CD/DVD. I get to a prompt that says "Boot from CD/DVD" and then it appears just to wait. I can insert my Fedora 11 installation disk and boot from it in rescue mode, and then I can see my entire file system, so I don't think the hard drive has failed. The system just doesn't seem to want to boot from the HD any more. I can get to a command line using the Fedora rescue mode, but I don't know what to do once I'm there.
one additional note. Around a month and a half ago I deleted some files by mistake and wanted to try to recover them. I tried a bunch of approaches that I came across (none worked), and I do remember that one of them had instructions to unmount a portion of the filesystem to protect it from being overwritten before I could recover the files.
Unfortunately, at this point I have no real memory of exactly what I did, but the system has been working fine since then. I would have thought that I had rebooted since then, but it's possible that this is the first time I've rebooted. Could I have unmounted some part of the file system such that it would still by unmounted even when rebooting? How can I check this from the command line I get in rescue mode? (My file system gets mounted under /mnt/sysimage/)
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Jul 4, 2011
I bought a USB Harddrive (Seagate 320 GB) and I want to install a Ubantu 10.04 LTS on it. Although my HP/Compaq Mobile Workstation has a selection to boot to a USB Harddrive, I could not get it to boot to the USB HD. So I found this page:
[URL]
And tried to create a CD as found in "Booting the kernel from a bootable CD". I thought I got the process to work, and it appears to have found the drive, but after a whole bunch of scrolling text and a long series of "stdin: error 0" I get:
BusyBox v1.13.3(Ubuntu 1:1.13.3-1ubuntu11) built-in shell (ash)
Enter 'help" for a list of commands
(initramfs)Unable to find a medium containing a live file system
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Jul 3, 2009
I have installed Kubuntu 9.04 to a USB external Iomega eGo Desktop hard drive (it's 1 terabyte). I've tried installing with my other hard drives attached (sdd) and with them disconnected (sda). The installs went smoothly in both cases but I cannot boot from the USB drive. My BIOS supports booting from various devices including USB. Can this be made to boot? How?
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Jan 25, 2010
I got a dell inspiron 1501 laptop with a 80Gb sata drive what is the best solution to add data storage space for someone that love to have multiples operating systems at hand Note: I use mostly linux so I won't need to change my laptop for many years maybe ...
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Oct 31, 2010
i was trying to install Linux on a old usb hard drive i have and i installed it onto the drive (from a .iso cd, i clicked install onto hard drive from the desktop) then rebooted. i tried to boot Linux from it but it did not work then i tried booting of the my main hard drive that has windows 7 on it and i get "failure to boot hard drive" (or something close to that). i reloaded fedora from the CD and looked and my main hard drive still has all of the files from windows and also the usb hard drive has files that look like they are from the Linux install.
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Nov 11, 2010
I tried to use Grub to boot the Fedora 14 Live CD from its ISO image (SHA256 verified) on the hard drive. I put Fedora-14-x86_64-Live-Desktop.iso in the root directory of the FAT32 partition D: (sda5) then extracted isolinux from this ISO, and put it on D: I followed the isolinux.cfg file, and wrote a menu.lst as follows:
title Fedora 14 Live CD
root (hd0,4)
kernel (hd0,4)/isolinux/vmlinuz0 root=live:CDLABEL=Fedora-14-x86_64-Live-Desktop rootfstype=auto ro liveimg quiet rhgb
initrd (hd0,4)/isolinux/initrd0.img
However Grub told me: No root device found. Boot has failed. Sleeping forever. Here's the contents of isolinux.cfg:
[Code]...
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Aug 30, 2010
I acquired an old IBM Thinkpad 770e the other day and it runs fine but I have an issue installing Linux on it. It has a floppy drive in it not a cd drive. It also does not have an ethernet jack or wifi.
I did clone my external firewall image to the drive but that image is partitioned in such a way to make it impractical for a laptop/desktop system. So I know that the machine will boot off a floppy and it will run off the hard drive. The bios test utility reports no hardware problems.
What I had hoped to do was to install some suitable distro to it. Not sure which one yet, any recommends? Damn Small Linux would be good except that you are limited to what they offer. I would also prefer to stay with a debian based distro.
The issue is install media. Floppy install images are not practical, and there is no cd drive. Is it possible to boot off a floppy and then chroot to, say a usb flash drive to do the install?
I do have a wifi card (d-link DWL-G650) that fits the micor-channel slot but it requires the madwifi driver which needs the kernel source and depends to be able to install. Not something that normally works out of the box so to speak.
Another question that comes to mind, Is it possible to dd a usb boot image to a hard drive and have it work?
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Mar 5, 2010
I bought a Samsung N150 netbook with the idea that I would install Linux on it.Now that I have it, I learn that it will *only* boot from the hard drive. there any Linux distribution that can install itself on this machine? Preferably in a separate partition allowing boot to either Linux or Win 7.This needs to be a high confidence installation, because if the existing Win 7 installation is screwed up there appears to be no way to recover.
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Jun 10, 2010
how do i delete a folder and its contents from terminal? when i tried to delete the folder it returns a- permission error,,-
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Mar 16, 2010
My parents bought a new hard drive for a laptop that I've owned for several years. It's much larger than the current one, so I plan on splitting it up to dual boot it with Ubuntu.I have no problem with partitioning a drive (I always keep a LiveCD handy), but my question is this: how can I go about moving the existing partition to the new drive? This is a laptop, so I can't simply plug the new drive into another slot.
Also, even if I manage to move it, will Windows still work on the new drive in a larger partition? I've had this laptop for quite a while, and I've lost the recovery discs that came with it a long time ago. I also have a lot of software without CDs to reinstall them with. This makes not reinstalling Windows a high priority.
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Dec 3, 2010
I'm just curious - why do all linux distros (all I've seen) run their periodic disk checks during boot? I mean, I understand that a disk should be checked now and then, but why does the system do it during boot, when I'm waiting for it to load, instead of checking them during shutdown, when (most probably) user doesn't need the computer anymore.
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Sep 11, 2010
I have windows xp on my first hard drive and Linux on the second hard drive.The windows hard drive is labeled hda1 and the linux hard drive is labeled hdb1.I am using GRUB to boot the linux hard drive and it is installed on hdb.Is there any way to boot the secondary linux hard drive using the windows bootloader?I have tried several online tutorials for it but none of them work.
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Apr 19, 2011
I'm very new to Linux and recently setup a desktop PC with Puppy 5.2.5. only. I chose to have a permanent install on the hard drive and loaded additional PETS and utilities as I thought needed for my use. Last night after immediately booting up the PC I had a power cut lasting a few minutes. When power returned and I repowered the PC, I found during Puppy's boot sequence it reported an error and remained in what appeared to be a console mode - did not carry through and load my desktop. So I inserted the Puppy CD and booted from that but I'm afraid I'm not familiar enough with Linux to understand how I can get back my original desktop setup and run once again from my hard drive without having to go back to scratch.
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Jan 15, 2011
I wanted to install a Linux distro to a flash drive so that I can have a portable OS with all my settings, programs, etc. wherever I go. So I fired up a Linux Mint Live CD and installed Mint to the flash drive, and this seems to work OK. But now, whenever I try to boot up my system normally without the flash drive plugged in, it doesn't seem to work. It basically hangs for a bit, and then I get the following prompt:
However, when I try powering my system up when the USB is plugged into the computer, it gives me an option between using the OS installed on my USB and the OS installed on my HD. Selecting the latter, everything loads up just fine. I'm guessing that installing Mint to the flash drive somehow messed with my native Grub installation.
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Apr 8, 2011
I have a Western Digital 1Tb WD10EAVS Caviar Gp Hard Drive. It does not have an operating system installed but it have alot of my important files. The hard drive began making a clicking sound and when I boot up my computer I see my other drives and the sata slot for that drive remains blank. Can any one help me recover or fix my hard drive
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May 16, 2011
we have an oracle application server on red hat 4.6 upon booting it comes up with error: attempting boot from hard drive (c GRUB)
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Feb 19, 2010
I recently bought a Buffalo 500GB ministation usb with "optional disk encryption". Turns out, I'm having one hell of a time trying to remove the "optional" from the drive. I figured I could just delete the program that is on the disk, and go on my way. That doesn't seem to be the case.
fdisk /dev/sdc1, then "p" showed that there were 4 partitions. So I deleted them one by one. "n" gave me a new partition. "t" I used 87 because I will be using it on windows. Then "w" to write everything.
mkfs -t ntfs /dev/sdc1 - all went well.
fsck -f -y /dev/sdc1 - all went well
Then I took the removed the drive and plugged into Windows only to find that the "optional" is still there. It actually creates a virtual drive with the "optional" software. So I tried it over again. I tried fdisk only to see that the partitions were back (as if they were never removed). I removed them again, and used primary partition as linux and wrote to disk. As a hunch, I checked permissions. Can't remember what it said, but I did change them.
chmod 777 /dev/sdc1
Then in a last hope of desperation, before coming to work today, I decided to dd the drive.
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdc1 bs=4k conv=notrunc
Is it possible that the "optional" stuff is actually hard coded onto a chip, or something inside the drive and I may never get rid of it?
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Mar 20, 2010
I have minor problem with upgrading a hard drive. I am running an old pentium lll with two hard drives. On the first hard drive I have two partitions of around 90GB each. On the first partition is installed winXP and on the second partition I have Suse 10.3, both booted by grub and living happily side by side. My second hard drive (which is formatted for windows is only 4GB.
My problem arises when I try to replace the 4GB with a 80Gb hard drive. When I disconnect the 4GB drive the system fails to boot up and complains with error 21.
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Nov 23, 2010
I tried to install 11.3 on my acer aspire 7530 notebook to have dual boot with xp.
I made 4 partitions: one for xp, and the three for linux were made automatically.Before installation I got the warning that the partition wasn't entirely below 128 gb, I installed anyway to give it a try.
The installation froze at 92% and after the laptop wouldn't boot.
Now I've formatted the hard disk and installed windows on a partition leaving a free un formatted partition of 100 gb.
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Aug 23, 2010
I have a SATA drive that worked fine. Then I installed two more hard drives into my system. When these hard drives are installed, if I try to access the SATA drive in Linux, it will start lightly clicking and then the drive will become unavailable. If I power on the machine without the other two hard drives then it works fine. What could be causing this to happen? I don't think it's heat because the two hard drives are far away from the SATA drive.
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