OpenSUSE Install :: Grub Error 18 - Unknown File System - Running From External Hard Drive
Jan 11, 2011
It started when I wanted to dual boot Windows 7 and Opensuse off of my netbook (No DVD/CD drive) I tried install suse from an external hard drive and I botched it. I ended up erasing EVERYTHING off of my internal netbook hard drive. Windows and all.
Well, I had a couple of other computers so I studied up and eventually successfully installed OpenSUSE 11.2 on my external hard drive (11.3 being the one that I accidentally erased everything with, so kinda scared of it) and now I want to install openSUSE 11.2 on my internal netbook hard drive.
I can not use disks
I can not use a flash drive (For some reason, even if I make it bootable, it will not load up, this could be because it's actually a 8GB microSD card that is placed in a USB card reader.)
I can not use an external hard drive because that's what I'm running suse off of.
I've tried reading up on how to install suse on another drive off of the hard drive and I've gotten as far as whenever I boot up the netbook with the suse external hard drive connected it will ask to boot into OpenSUSE, the Fail Safe, or to install OpenSuse. When I select to install it it gives me the Error 18 Unknown File system.
I've tried formatting the internal hard drive twice. One as NTFS and again as EXT4. Neither seems to effect it other than when it's ext4 I can open it and it contains a Lost and Found folder.
When I interrupt the boot sequence by pressing c and going to the terminal and I use the root (hd +TAB command it tells me I have a hd0 and a hd1. The hd1 only has 1 partition which is ext4, which I'm assuming hd1 is the internal hard drive (I'm not sure how to check) and the hd0 is the external hard drive, which has three partitions. One with an unknown file system and two with ext4. When I try to enter the set up from the terminal it gives me the same error for any thing I put it (e.g. root (hd0,0) gives the same error as root (hd0,1), or root (hd0,2) and root (hd1,0)
Something like it cannot locate these two files I'm assuming it needs to boot. If anyone finds this relevant I'll retry it and post the files its missing.
I've been searching for awhile and can't find any threads that can solve my problem. From other threads, however, I have noticed that I should probably include my menu.lst, listed below
Code:
I have also ran the boot info script and received the RESULTS.txt file it generates. Listed below
I recently installed openSUSE 11.4 on another hard disk of my 11.3 machine. I have another drive in my computer that is used solely for extra storage. Before installing 11.4 I could boot my computer with or without the drive installed, but now if I try to boot without it I get Error 17 from GRUB. I don't understand this as there is nothing on that drive that should be needed by boot and I can find nothing in the GRUB configuration that references the drive.I am getting ready to clear the whole system for a fresh install anyways, but it would be nice to know for future knowledge what is causing it.
I have Ubuntu/Vista dual boot desktop with Single HDD (200GB) that i cloned to an external USB HDD (320GB) using clonezilla. My intention is to use the external HDD as a backup to up running in case my 3 year old desktop HDD fails. To make sure the clone is good to use if need, i connected external HDD to USB port and tried boot from it but got "Error 18". I tried to Google got some infoDid a fdisk -lu and got the following.
Code: Disk /dev/sda: 200.0 GB, 200049647616 bytes 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 24321 cylinders, total 390721968 sectors
i installed ubuntu 10.04.. all very nice, but not the os for me.. lightscribe problems, front ir panel problems. minor niggles for sure, but enough for me to go ahead with formatting and installing windows. simple job...or so i thought... using windows set up, i formatted c: and continued with install...on first restart i got a grub error saying unknown file system... i have tried loads of different things... fix mbr fixboot, that nt60 one. dban wouldnt work either.. im at my wits end ive spunked the best part of 1000 on this system and my wife is nagging me.
I have a pc that was running with the latest version of ubuntu and i wanted to install just vista for somereasons.
And what i did is to format the main driver and try to boot it from vista CD and as you may guess i have an error that says: unknown file system grub rescue
Each time i start the pc. I have an ubuntu live cd and also the vista cd, so what should i do now? the vista cd dosnt boot and the same screen appears all the time.
I have a 1.5TB Western Digital Caviar Green in a USB 2.0 external setup with an ext4 file system. I'm going to purchase a 2.0TB Western Digital Caviar Green in a USB 2.0 external case, copy the data over and put my 1.5TB in a fire-resistant box in another house. I'm worried about a couple things however:
(1) I'm worried about the long-term viability of _any_ file system years into the future. I've been storing my data on hard drives (instead of CDs, DVDs or BDs) for years now due to their higher reliability than optical disks. However, the file system used in optical disks is UDF which I think has much longer viability into the future. I'm not going to store terabytes of data on optical discs of course, so I'm wondering what I should choose for a hard drive file system. FAT32 or NTFS (due to Windows' 90%+ presence on the desktop, including still being used by Windows 7) may be the best choice, but I much rather have a open source file system, especially one that allows for permissions, timestamps, etc.
(2) As for my 2TB hard drive that I will be using for a while into the future, should I continue to use ext4 (I've had no problem with it thus far), but is there another file system that has better performance when storing and transferring gigs of data?
My external disk does not appear as mounted on the desktop (It's e-Sata and NTFS, samsung 1.36 Tera bytes ) There's nothing in /media, nor it appears on the desktop as mounted. What can i do to be able to use it?
i needed to change my external hard drive's file system from ext3 to fat32, to use it in windows, which i did the simple way: i shrunk the ext3 partition, made a fat32 partition, copied the files over, removed the ext3 and made the fat32 bigger. unfortunately, while gparted was making the partition larger, my computer shut down. i lost all my files and the partition messed up immediately. i made a new fat32 partition, after deleting the old one, but noticed that gparted was showing 100 gigs already in use (???). so now i have a 300 gb hard drive with only 200 gb i can use; i ran df to make sure gparted wasn't messing up, but indeed it shows the partition as being only 200 gigs in size. i haven't tried making any other kind of partition yet, such as ext3, for fear of losing my files again, and because it wouldn't be permanent anyway, because i need those files in windows and stupid microsoft won't make their OS ext3 compatible.
I've been running Debian Lenny kernel 2.6.26 w/ desktop kde3.5 on my laptop for a while, and im going to take a trip in which i will be unable to take wmy laptop with me. However, where i am going contains computers and i figured if i could install debian onto my external harddrive, i could just boot onto the other computers. I install it using the debianlenny-i386 dvd image. However whenever I try to boot it from a computer. Grub returns
Code: Grub Loading... Error 21 and then the blinkng cursor. On one site i found something saying "you may need to activat the drive" and some command-line instructions on how to do it. However the commands have faded from memory and i am now unable to find that site again. Could anyone offer insight on how to fix this "grub error 21" or how to activate it. I run primarily debian but i have a windows partition on one of my relative's computers. Thank you in advance for the help!!! btw I'm installing on a western digital 500gb "passport" external hard drive with ext3 and swap partitions.
What I've done is partition my external hard drive to have 130g for my Windows info. Then putting the 90g towards Linux. I used a live cd on my home computer to format the 90g of Linux. I'm simply wanting something to learn more about from time to time that I can use on my home computer, laptop, fiance's computer, etc. So the formatting went successful. I have linux on the 90g of hard drive that I wanted it on. The problem is this. When I take the live cd out, when I remove my external hard drive from my computer. The home computer (which has Windows) won't boot. It comes up with a error 21. But now when I boot with the external hard drive I use, I make it to the boot menu and can boot from Windows.I need to be able to boot from Windows on this home computer, since my mother and grandparents use this computer quite a bit. I'm not always going to have my ext. hard drive plugged into this computer, so I need some help if you all know now.
I bought a new hard drive. I thought it would be clever and SAFE to install Ubuntu on the Hard Drive so that would not interfere with the internal hard drive on my laptop. It worked fine until I disconnected the hard drive. I got the "Grub Error 21" when I installed. I know how to get around it, unfortunately, I have to lug around this hard drive whenever my computer sleeps or restarts. I would like to be able to restart and boot into Windows without my hard drive connected. Is this possible?
I have windows on my box, I have fedora 14 on my external that goes through my usb. Grub is installed on my usb. Since the only thing stored on my external was fedora i really didn't have to do much to it. just go into bios and boot from usb. Now that im using fedora more, Id like to add Vista to my choices. I guess the numbers change once your using an external drive. Ive read some of the problems like mine but they didn't quite do it. Im going to inclose 2 screen shots of my drives/partitions and my grub.conf.
# grub.conf generated by anaconda # Note that you do not have to rerun grub after making changes to this file # NOTICE: You have a /boot partition. This means that
I recently decided to try out openSUSE 11.4 with gnome and install it on my external USB HDD. To do so i followed this guide here SDB:Installation on external hard drive - openSUSE
Unfortunately after finishing the install when trying to boot into the system i got GRUB error 17. The only thing i did differently from the guide was placing the /boot partition after a ~800 GB NTFS partition with my data.
I tried to solve the problem by reinstalling the system with different settings than before. After completing all of the steps in the guide mentioned i disabled booting from MBR and enabled booting from /boot partition. Also set the installer to write generic boot code to MBR.
Though after the installation i realized that grub is not loading at all this time and went on to fix it by completing the steps here SDB:All about GRUB - openSUSE . After doing so i'm back to GRUB error 17.
Subject: grub no auto update new hard drive.doc Date: 07/26/2010 03:48:45 PM grub no auto update new hard drive.When installed 11.2 on Western Digital VelociRaptor 150 GB hard drive and now installed 300 GB VelociRaptor drive. Your grub does not update correctly to identity the op systems after the new drive is imaged; youre kidding right? I request that you provide the instruction for correcting this; you must have and auto update for grub.
When I first installed the openSUSE, I had to extract whole iso to sda4, because there was some kind of with CD (scratched or something like that), Now I want to add this part to grub, so that when I want to reinstall it, it will be ready for me. I tried doing this with yast, but could't figure out whole thing.
My current setup: kernel image: (hd0,4)/boot/i386/vmlinuz-xen initial ram disk : (hd0,4)/boot/initrd-xen root-device:/dev/disk/by-id/ata-TOSHIBA_MK8032GAX_76HE0769T-part4 vga-mod:1024x768, 24 bits (mode 0x318) optional parameters: resume=/dev/disk/by-id/ata-TOSHIBA_MK8032GAX_76HE0769T-part4 splash=silent quiet showopts
This tries to do it, but gives error while trying to boot.
Having problems with external hard drives. I may be wrong, but I suspect they originated with an upgrade to 10.04 last Christmas. Around that time I also started using Amazon's S3 storage system, and, as a consequence, I stopped using my WD 80G external drive, previously used to backup my important files.
A week or so ago I decided to start using the WD drive again. I can't remember exactly what I did, but it wasn't happy - never caused any problems before. When I plug it in, the on-off light as the front keeps flashing on and off, and when I try to remove the drive I get the message: Error unmounting volumne An error occured while performing an operation on "My Book" (Partition 1 of WD 800BB External): The device is busy
Details: Cannot unmount because file system on device is busy Assuming the device had died - it's about 5 years old - I bought a 160G Samsung S-Series drive - my but they do look neat! Unfortunately, this doesn't seem to have solved my problem. I plugged the new drive in, and it happily appeared on my desktop. It seemed a good idea at the time, but I then started to format the drive - using the default option of FAT. All went well at first, but then the format process stopped.
My new Samsung drive now seems to be operating pretty much as the WD device, I can't copy to the drive, and attempts to unmount it generate a response similar to what's happening with the WD drive. Currently, although plugged in, I can't see the drive on my desktop, although it appears under Places. However, when I try to mount the drive, I get the message: Unable to mount SAMSUNG A job is pending on /dev/sdb1
With the generous help from caf4926 and please_try_again, i was able to boot into Ubuntu 9.10 with suse's grub legacy.Now I have another problem that i'd need help on, I added a new IDE hard drive for storage and it became sda and the original sda with 3 OSes changed to sdb. Grub can't boot into any OSes except windows 7. Well, i can still boot into Ubuntu if i change the boot option from
I've tried to be clever but as usual I didn't think before acting and missed a small detail.
I have recently installed karmic (dual booting with Vista) on my dell xps laptop. The install went fine, I'm very happy with my new OS.
I bought a new Seagate 500GB portable external HDD. I got a bit over-excited and installed karmic on the external drive. This worked fine and I got a lovely (but slow to appear) Grub2 menu showing my vista and both ubuntu options.
My problem is that now, when I unplug the external drive, Grub fails and I get a grub rescue> prompt. So I need the external drive to be plugged in if I want to boot.
It seems I have done something to the grub configuration. I have read around the subject but I am not confident about how best to proceed.
I understand there is an 'advanced' option in the installer which will allow me to choose where to install grub. Presumably I want it on the internal drive so that I can boot without the external one plugged in.
Am I right in thinking I can just pop in my install disk and redo the installation?
If I indicate I want to install Grub on the internal drive, which partition should I aim for?
Will I get a grub option for booting to the external drive?
Will I be able to plug the external drive into a different machine and boot from it?
I haven't done anything with the fresh install on the external drive so I don't mind losing that.
A few days back, I was moving a file from my home directory to a 1TB WD external hard drive (NTFS). In the middle of the process, the power went out so moving was interrupted. Now, the file I was trying to move is there on the external hard drive, but it can not be read, moved, renamed or removed. Besides, the destination folder on the external hard drive and all other files in it can be read, but they can't be removed or renamed.
i have a 2TB WD external HDD, works ok in windows, although sometimes tries to run on some random driver.when connected in linux i get the following error, however, my other 500GB WD HDD works flawlessly:Quote:An error occurred while accessing '2TB Backup', the system responded: org.freedesktopUDisks.Error. Failed: Error mounting: mount exited with exit code 12: Failed to read last sector (3907027119):
My father installed Kubuntu to his external hard drive to try it out, however, it is running extremely slowly. It takes a good minute and a half to boot to the Plasma desktop and it even seems to run faster off of the LiveCD.His system easily meets the specifications to run Kubuntu (4 gigs of RAM, decent NVIDIA graphics card) yet it slows to a crawl immediately upon booting. Does anyone know how to fix this? The hard drive is a Western Digital MyBook, 475GB model.
Just installed Slackware 13 this morning. It's been a long time since I last tried Linux, but Slack works (a lot easier than Slack 8 did back when I last used it!) quite well. I'm using the XFCE desktop and it's smooth as silk except for one odd problem-I cannot get any of my USB drives to mount. I just plugged in my Lexar 4GB USB flash drive and received an error message. Here's from /var/log/messages from when I initally plugged in the drive (I have a 500GB WD MyBook USB external drive that is always plugged in):
Any ideas or suggestions of what to look at? I'm not familiar with HAL in Linux although I've seen plenty of discussion about it and have an idea of what it's supposed to (or break! ).
I previously had Ubuntu installed on my MBR. I deleted that partition (32 GB), resized my Mac partition back up to (250 GB), and then reduced it to 200 GB and created a new one with 50 GB via BootCamp to install Windows 7 from a DVD that I burnt (I got a Windows executable from MSDNAA that I used with Wine to obtain the ISO image. Insert rant about having to download Windows with a Windows executable here.).
I've tried burning two different DVDs. I used Burn on my Mac to burn a data DVD+R with the HFS+ and Joliet filesystems (I think) and then tried again with the ISO9660 and UDF filesystems. The latter has not shown any signs of working besides mounting on OS X. The first DVD would not boot whenever I held 'C' down at time of boot. So I went into BootCamp and clicked "Start Installation". It restarted my computer and this is where the real confusion comes up. I think that it tried booting via the empty partition. The reason I say this is that there are remnants of GRUB and when I boot, I get a screen that says this: error: unknown filesystemrub rescue>
Yesterday I installed the latest version of ubuntu to my computer that was already running windows 7. I had everything working fine until in windows I deleted a partition that had nothing in it.
After this I restarted but I can't get into either OS. I get an error that says Error: unknown filesystem grub rescue>
I think I need to fix something in grub. I have been booting off of a usb stick with linux on it in the mean time.
Yesterday I installed the latest version of ubuntu to my computer that was already running windows 7. I had everything working fine until in windows I deleted a partition that had nothing in it. After this I restarted but I can't get into either OS.
I get an error that says Error: unknown filesystem grub rescue>
I've installed Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal on a External HDD (320GB Samsung S2). Worked like a charm. Bit slow to boot up and load programs, but after a while, works great. I installed it on the external HDD for one purpose: Work anywhere with Ubuntu, no matter which computer I use. I was thinking that was impossible, but I've tested thru several platforms (3 Notebooks, 2 netbooks, all Intel and one AMD Desktop). All worked flawlessly (32 Bits PAE activated and no matter how many cores are active, just works), BUT the themes.For no apparent reason, themes works on the computer I've installed Ubuntu on the HDD. It has his own Internal HDD with Windows 7 and two NTFS partitions.
Themes are stuck to the default boring-white from Gnome. I can only change the window controls. Compiz works, Wireless works, video works, sound works, filesystem works, system works - themes fail. Feels like I've hit my feet's little finger on a chair. P.S.: Ext. HDD is partitioned like this: 300GB FAT32 (it's my pop's HDD, he wants it this way), 18GB EXT4, 2GB Swap.
