Ubuntu Installation :: Boot Sector Is Corrupt And WinXP Faces Reboot Loop After Trying To Install?
Sep 16, 2010
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,
I just installed Ubuntu Remix 10.04 on my wifes MSI U100 netbook. I did a dual boot just in case she had to get into Windows for something. I let the install automatically partion (did the side by side option). Anyway, Ubuntu works fine and imported all her documents and stuff. Problem is Windows XP won't boot. The first time I tried to boot Windows XP I got a message saying the hardware had changed and I had to select safe mode, normal boot, last known good, etc... I booted normally. I got the splash screen followed by a quick flash of BSOD and a reboot. I does this no matter how I try to boot Windows (safe, command prompt, etc). Anyone have any idea what the problem is?
I recently installed Netbook Remix(Karmic, I think) on my Samsung N130 netbook as a dual boot with Windows 7. It had been working fine, I'd had no problems switching OS and I had restarted my computer many times without issue.
Today, I was on Windows 7, set it to hibernate when I left the house as I sometimes do, and when I came back and turned my computer on, first it asked which system I wanted to load which it never does after hibernation. I selected Windows, and it took me to the Samsung Recovery Solution screen for some reason, and I closed that. It restarted the computer, and when it turned back on it said GRUB loading, and rebooted again, and keeps looping that whenever I turn it on.
I tried removing Ubuntu using GParted from a flash drive, but I'm still stuck in the loop, and it's gotten rather frustrating.
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 tried to install ubuntu 10.04 on a desktop in dual boot with win XP. Ubuntu doesn't boot. It only happens after a reboot of win XP. I upgraded to 10.10 but nothing changed, i made a clean install but still it happens..I mean:
1. Power on 2. grub -> ubuntu 3. splash screen freezed otherwise: 1. Power on 2. grub -> WinXP 3. reboot 4. grub -> ubuntu 5. ubuntu run perfectly
I have some proprietory softwares installed on WinXP so it is very important for my work that it is up and running.
I performed a FULL INSTALL from the Live-CD (10.10) and installed grub on the windows partition. Now whenever I try to select the Windows option in the Grub menu, the screen goes blank and it gets me back to the Grub menu.
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 updated wubi kernel(ubuntu 10.04) After restart, i selected ubuntu then my system reboots. Then i select ubuntu then my system reboots. I dont know what to do now,
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 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 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.
Using Ubuntu and any Linux OS. I installed Ubuntu using the Wubi installer. Everything went fine. When the install wizard completed and asked to Reboot Now, I did. When my computer rebooted, the Windows Boot Manager doesn't appear and it goes straight to Windows.
I'm using 32 bit Vista and have an AMD Athlon X2 Dual Core Processor 5000+. When using Wubi, the download defaults to the AMD 64 version and that is what I have installed.
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 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
Im currently not an linux expert so I turn to this forum after several attempts to fix my issue with grub.
I had a dualboot single HD with both win7 and win8.1 when I decided to install debian wheezy from usb.
I deleted the win7 partition and installed debian there. The partition scheme is separate /home
After reboot I automatically get into the "Grub rescue mode" and now I´m stuck.
I tried the commands:
set prefix=(hd0,msdosX)/boot/grub/ Insmod normal
I have msdos1, msdos3, msdos5 and msdos6 but nothing is listing anything from the grub rescue mode.
I get the "UNKNOWN FILE SYSTEM" error and cant get past that.
I also tried booting into rescue mode from usb iso install but nothing happens when choosing to repair GRUB.
The listed devices in rescue mode are:
/dev/sda1 /dev/sda2 /dev/sda3 /dev/sda5 /dev/sda6 debian uses sdb 1-2 and sdb1 is the only option to Reinstall GRUB on but it gives me "Unable to install GRUB in /dev/sdb1 This is a fatal error" message /dev/sdb1 /dev/sdb2
I think I managed to corrupt my master boot record, or have a very intractable problem with Grub.
I'm not sure how I did this, but my desktop will boot Ubuntu fine from a USB, but every time I try to install it, the install seems to go fine, but when I finish the install and the machine tries to boot the OS from it's hard drive, it does not work. The monitor does not get a signal and it just goes to sleep.
I tried posting here to resolve the problem before, tried everything on this thread: [URL]
But nothing worked.
I have even tried running the system from a USB, running a "shred" command for the hard drive and then reinstalling - my theory was that the shred command would destroy all the data on the hard drive anyway, and allow a "clean" install from whatever was corrupt on it, but no luck - when I installed Ubuntu on the hard drive, same problem.
I'm not clear where the problem lies now, I'm assuming there is something up with it's master boot record, but there are no partitions on it's hard drive and I started with a completely blank, unformatted drive.
I have been a happy little GRUB user for a while now, but now I want to use GRUB to boot a physically separate WinXP hard drive, and I can't seem to do that. Normally GRUB is easy, (I even have a nice splash screen of my own making). Its a champion solution for booting into Ubuntu Linux on /dev/sda5 or Win XP on /dev/sda1.
My second HD which Linux recognizes as /dev/sdb, has a Win XP boot sector and Win XP in one partition.
Normally I boot off /dev/sda using GRUB, and from Linux I can mount and have access to /dev/sdb - that works well. Occasionally however, I need to boot the separate Win XP system on the second HD, and to do that I switch the boot drive in the BIOS, but lately that is getting to be a bit tedious.
Initially I though to give the additional boot choice to GRUB, I simply had to edit /boot/grub/menu.lst and point to the second HD (where /dev/sdb = hd1 in GRUB speak). Unfortunately, when I select the new choice, it simply boots Win XP off the first HD.
I'm confident GRUB does look at the first partion on hd1 as expected as I can induce an error by having hd1 disconnected, or write silly partion numbers into menu.lst. So if it does in fact find the first partion on hd1, why doesn't it boot? Why does it default to WinXP on hd0?
I have diligently tried physically swapping SATA drive cables and playing with bios switching and have messed about a fair bit with menu.lst to make sure I have drive and partition numbers right, but all to no avail. I have also tried changing rdisk(0) in boot.ini to rdisk(1) on the second drive when it is not the boot drive.
I'm afraid the only other thing I can think of is that the second hard drive requires a Linux boot sector if I am going to boot it up from GRUB, but somehow that doesn't make sense. Surely GRUB can work across physically separate drives, so I'm open to other ideas first.
I've got an old Dell Precision 670 which has a SCSI disk. I installed 10.04 and everything worked fine - I could boot into 10.04 from the GRUB menu. I later added an IDE disk and installed WinXP Pro on it.
When I ran 'sudo update-grub', Lucid discovered the IDE disk and added a WinXP Pro entry to the GRUB menu. Now, though I can still boot 10.04 from the GRUB menu, I can't boot WinXP - the screen goes blank, and I have to hit Ctrl-Alt-Del to restart.
For what it's worth, here are the results of using boot_info_script055.sh:
Code: Boot Info Script 0.55 dated February 15th, 2010 ============================= Boot Info Summary: ============================== => Windows is installed in the MBR of /dev/sda => Grub 2 is installed in the MBR of /dev/sdb and looks on the same drive in partition #1 for /boot/grub.
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 have winxp and ubuntu 10.04 dualboot. They were working ok. Today I removed old *21 kernel image and headers so grub updated the confs. That's all I did that could cause the win no longer boot. It starts booting, the screen goes black and the PC reboots. I tried safe mode, it started to load some dlls as it usually shows in safe mode but then still reboot.
Code: $ sudo fdisk -l Disk /dev/sda: 160.0 GB, 160041885696 bytes 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 19457 cylinders Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
I originally wanted to dual install 10.10 64 Ubuntu with Windows 7 64 RAID 1 HP PC, but RAID got corrupted and I could find no fix online except using fakeraid unsupported software. The whole thing blew my muind. I gave up after 4 or so reinstalls of windows 7 to fix RAID. So I decided to install a dual boot 10.10 Ubuntu i86 with my old WinXP i86. I kept getting these errors at boot up: unknown filesystem, file not found, out of disk, no such partion and so on. I tried just about every grub reinstall I could find, including article here: "Recovering Ubuntu after Installing Windows."
After a number of tries my friend installed Ubuntu successfully, but then when I installed windows xp I am stuck here, again. I did do the Reload grub tutorials again as well. I may just give up on WinXP and have my friend reinstall Ubuntu for me.
WinXP Partition loading as a read only and can't fix it with PYSDM (storage device manager) Let me provide some history as to how everything was installed: From my old WIN XP hard drive I used clonezilla to clone the drive to a partition on my new hard drive for Linux. Windows is on SDA4 which is the last partition of the drive, it is mounted at sda4/windows using ntfs. I then loaded Mint 8 gnome on the 2nd partition sda2 using ext3 mounted at /, sda1 is my Linux swap, and sda3 is mounted at /home using ext3. While installing I selected to mount Linux ext3 at /
When I choose to load winXP from the grub boot loader I get dev/sda4 no such device 10CDR36778638F73. Also when I try to unmount from disk utility I get the following error: Error unmounting: umount exited with exit code 1: helper failed with: umount: only root can unmount UUID=10CDF36778638F73 from /windows Seemslike I need to rename the drive but it won't let me in disk utility.
My Problem is that within PYSDM (storage device manager) I uncheck Mount file system (sda4/windows) as a read only but it will not stay unchecked. I have unchecked it hit unmount and mount and it still is checked to mount as a read only. This is the code in options for sda4 in PYSDM (storage device manager) nls=utf8,umask=007,gid=46
I am dual booting a lab of 30 machines in an elementary school. They already have XP installed and I don't want to mess with that. I certainly don't want to have to go to each one with a windows CD to 'repair' each one if this goes wrong.
So i tested on one (installed through PXE) and Ubuntu boots fine but I am getting:
'ntoskrnl.exe is corrupt' errors now. I can't move on until I sort this out.
I have currently installed Xubuntu via wubi on my windows XP. When I try to boot, it displays an error message stating that wubildr.mbr is missing or corrupt and I cannot boot into xubuntu.
I've just had to reinstall WinXP on a Dell Inspiron 1501. An ideal opportunity to try out Ubuntu. First I tried a WinXP/Hardy Heron dual boot - all seems okay. Next WinXP/Karmic dual boot - all seems okay. Then, why not, WinXP/Hardy/Karmic triple boot - all seems okay. Playing with each OS I noticed that Hardy had a couple of update notifications. So I opened Update Manager, went on-line, hit [Check] and was informed that there were 200+ Important Security Updates - I installed these. Better check Karmic too - similar story, installed 200+ updates. Everything still seems okay in WinXP, Hardy and Karmic. However, I've just noticed that the Grub2 boot menu now displays eight "Ubuntu" lines, as opposed to the four lines I had originally
Ubuntu, Linux 2.6.31-19-generic Ubuntu, Linux 2.6.31-19-generic (recovery mode) Ubuntu, Linux 2.6.31-14-generic Ubuntu, Linux 2.6.31-14-generic (recovery mode)...
I' trying to install 10.10 Desktop from a CD onto a Dell E5410 notebook with Windows 7 installed.
The problem is that during the installation, the installer doesn't see the Windows partition, moreover, it doesn't see _any_ other partition.
I've tried with CentOS 5.5 as well and it returned some error related to GPT Partition Table corrupt which might have been corrupted by a software (or not).
Removing Windows 7 completely is not an option, there's a bunch of business applications which will not run on Linux even with Wine.
I'm not sure if the problem lies on the hardware, or the installer. The BIOS provides advanced UEFI boot options and legacy boot, but this doesn't explain why no partition is discovered.
Tech specs: core i5, 4GB ram, 320 GB disk space. The installer is 32 bit, but I'm quite the architecture doesn't really matter.
If someone has more knowledge about this kind of issue, any answer is welcome.
