Ubuntu Installation :: Booting From BIOS Or From Live CD 'first Hard Drive'?
May 8, 2011
If an old bios and mainboard is being used, such that it cannot handle the large size of HD, then is it useful to say use a live CD and from its initial menu (pressed a key), choose 'Boot From First Hard Disk'? Would this be similar in getting around a bios and disk size limitation I wonder - like - does the use of a live CD in this way avoid using the bios to point to the active partition??
The reason for asking is that a friend has a couple of quality old rack mounted server machines and wants to use Ubuntu having now fitted 80 GB empty drives. Live CD seems ok, and 11.04 install goes ok but on boot up grub comes back with an error.
I recall that early machines cannot see larger(?) HDs for booting purposes even though installs go ok in very large HDs. I wondered if a live CD to boot up temporarily - trouble shooting - would be worth trying for this reason, or am I way off?
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Jul 17, 2010
I have a Sony VAIO AR series, it contains two separate 120GB hard drives that were originally configured in a raid. They're called hd0, and hd1. I disabled the raid and partitioned hd1 in 3 ways, one medium sized partition for the operating system (ext4), one large partition for storage (ext4) and one small partition for Swap space. I then installed Ubuntu onto hd1 with help from UNetbootin. After installation went fine I loaded up Windows installer, created two NTFS partitions, one medium and one large, and installed Windows 7 of the medium sized partition. Now I can't figure out how to boot into the Ubuntu side on hd1. Needless to say, in Windows, hd1 is not visable at all. I can see my two NTFS partitions fine.
When booting up I go through two main screens. The first screen "Matrix Storage Manager Option ROM," lists the physical disks (0, and 1.) and gives me the option to enter configuration with [cntrl+i]. The second screen gives me a list of options to boot from, Yet they are all Windows options and many are redundant. The list includes "Enter Command Line," which when selected tells me "Boot failed! Press any key to enter command line." command line brings me to "grub>" I tried booting Ubuntu from this command line, but don't have much to work with here. I followed this guide, but it didn't take me to completion and I'm not sure where to go from here. http://www.mepis.org/docs/en/index.p...m_command_line
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May 21, 2011
I have a dual boot machine with WinXP/Linux Mint on it. I am looking to erase both of them and put up Ubuntu 11.04.
I have chosen to go with a live USB install for this. The live USB boots fine and everything seems usable. However, when I tried to install it would tell me that I do not have 4GB available for the install which seemed a bit weird since I have a 160GB Maxtor HDD.
After digging around a bit I realized that the system does not see my hard drive. Running fdisk -l would only show the USB drive that I am booting from and not the main HDD.
I tried to have a look in /dev to see if my HDD is there and not mounted. But aside from sda which is the USB I did not find an sdb or hd entry.
Has anyone encountered a similar problem while trying to install Ubuntu 11.04?
P.S.: The HDD works fine, I can see it in BIOS and in the other 2 OS-es that I have installed.
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Jul 13, 2010
Quick background: I've always had problems with Ubuntu on my external hard drive, but I think it's actually with grub in Gnome - any Gnome. I had Karmic installed until after grub upgraded and a bootloader error made it impossible to log in, so I went over to PCLOS KDE.
I've missed Ubuntu and really wanted Lucid, so I tried reinstalling it to the external. Same problem. I tried PCLOS Gnome, and, yep, same - though I could reinstall the KDE version no problem. Anyway, after umpteen attempts, which included formatting the external drive in Windows (which doesn't ever recognise the external in My Computer till I do), letting Ubuntu do the partitioning, doing the partitioning myself, I finally tried to install through Windows via Wubi - still to the external drive.
It failed, and now the drive is not recognised in the BIOS, Ubuntu, or Windows (I've now installed a dual Ubuntu-Windows boot on my internal). Have I stuffed up my external drive? Is there some way I can make it recognisable (changing BIOS settings???). Do I need to supply more information?
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Jan 1, 2011
I have been running Ubuntu 9.04 for the past year. Tonight decided to upgrade to 9.10 thru update manager. Every thing regarding the install seemed fine until the request to restart the computer. I hit the restart and it will not boot up. Computer goes thru the normal restart screens.
Screen flashes with bios info--no hard drive detected, then proceeds to show booting from hd, then loads grub stage 1.5 (not grub 2)and screen goes blank.
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Mar 15, 2010
I have an 8GB Sandisk Cruzer, which reportedly works just fine booting Linux. It does have U3 still present on one of the partitions, but this should not pose any problems either. I also have a 2GB FAT32 partition for storing Windows stuff. The rest (5.7GB) I have reserved for Ubuntu. Windows reports this as an active partition, and the Ubuntu boot CD reports this partition as dev/sdb5. I have installed Ubuntu from the Desktop CD to the USB partition using the guided install (largest continuous free space) and selected the boot (grub) location on the same partition (sdb5), as I'd rather not modify my existing windows bootloader. A 300MB swap partition also exists on the drive. When I attempt to boot the USB drive from either my laptop (Inspiron 1505) or desktop (Abit IP35 Pro), only a blinking dash (or underscore) appears with no LED activity on the flash drive. Could it be that the MBR of the flash drive needs to be aware that the grub install is located at sdb5?
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May 9, 2011
I have just finished building a new computer and it booted with no problems from the hard drive to ubuntu 10.10 (it was a hard drive from a previous computer and had ubuntu installed). After less than a minute though it froze up completely. I restarted and now cannot get ubuntu to boot. I get to GRUB with no problems but when I try to boot ubuntu I get a black screen with a blinking cursor in the top left corner and it hangs indefinitely.
I tried to boot from a live cd to see if there was anything I could do but I get as far as the screen to choose "Try Ubuntu" or "Install" and both choices leave me on a black screen with the mouse icon. I can move the mouse but nothing else. I have tried the Ubuntu 10.10 32 bit, 11.04 64-bit, 11.04 32-bit and even Mythbuntu, which I had on a cd from a magazine. I get the same result with all of these.
On the other hand, OpenSUSE 11.4 boots from the Live CD fine and I installed it and it boots from the hard drive. This is good news but I would much prefer Ubuntu, as I'm more used to it. Am I doing something wrong or have I any hope?
The computer specs are:
Processor: AMD phenom II X2 555
Motherboard: Asus M4A88TD V-EVO
Memory: G-Skill Ripjaws 4GB Dual channel
Hard Drive: Seagate Barracuda 200GB
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Feb 7, 2010
Can you install a live cd onto hard drive? I'm in a live environment now and don't see an install option.
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Mar 2, 2009
I've installed F10-live.iso onto a usb key but am having problems with the non-privileged user I created. When I login as kurt, I do not have access to my home directory on the hard drive. I tried [root@localhost home] #chmod kurt kurt (after cd-ing to the correct spot), but still cannot access my files there. I can do so as Live System User, but not as me.
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Jul 10, 2010
I have an HP motherboard w/P4 with 40 GB disk another Maxtor 500GB Hard disk on the usb. Problem: On start up with device selection for booting, my pen drive always gets listed as USB HDD0 and USB HDD1 and Iam able to boot thru' them. However my Maxtor HDD in the first partition of which I have installed FC 13 after much pain,so as to not disturb my existing installation FC 11 in internal drive. This device itself is not visible, nothing to have to say about its partitions in bios list of devices to select. Whether this is a drive related problem or bios related. How may I make it visible in bios list.
Further note: Fedora core 13 installation didn't worry about the windows XP and Fedora 11 installation in main drive. It allowed for installation of the individual boot loader in the installation drive itself.
Bios not recognising this drive precluded access at boot from grub.conf of the exising FC 11 installation too.
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Mar 18, 2011
i have just put in my new 320gb seagate hdd and it shows in bios, however upon booting from USB it does not show on the OS, nor does it show on the installer does anyone have any idea what could cause this or how to sort it?
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Feb 18, 2011
I probably have not done any serious programming for 20 years, not counting a little HTML.
I stumbled onto an old FREESPIRE disk my bro sent me several years back -- and tried installing it on a Sony Vaio PCG FRV 28 I had crashed a few years back. The Sony bios is still aboard, but old enough to not have USB "booting" as part of the boot menu. I don't even know if one can easily hack into the BIOS on an old sony Vaio but changing the BIOS would solve lot of problems.
Does anyone have any ideas or certain knowledge on rewriting or modifying the Master Boot Code or an idea on making my USB [with Ubuntu or any other Linux implementation visible] and bootable to the bios on powerup?
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Feb 21, 2010
I switched the Hard Drive in my main desktop yesterday with another just so I could install something on it. Then, when I switched my other desktop hard drive back to it's original, it wouldn't detect it.
The power cables and all the connections are still good, because it still recognizes my other computers hard drive. I'm in deep trouble for screwing up the family PC, how can I fix it?
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May 2, 2010
start getting Linux up and running. Like a lot of people, I chose an older computer I could fuss with, a 500mhz 256meg ram machine, and decided to install Puppy on a spare 40meg hard drive I have, as my bios does not boot from usb...I think...
Anyway, I have found that my bios does not recognize the hard drive when formatted to ext2! I have taken the drive and formatted it back to ntfs, and my bios recognizes it, and then back again to ext2, and nope, it's not there, thus I am still booting puppy from the cd...sigh...
Is my bios so out of date that I'm just out of luck? Is there anyway to check this?
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Mar 23, 2011
I installed(actually i hope i did) CentOS 5.5.However i can see my HDD in Hard drive menu in bios but HDD doesn't shows in boot menu.
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Apr 17, 2010
I am trying to install Ubuntu 9.10 on a laptop. The laptop does not have working cd-rom or an operating system installed. I was hoping to install via USB cd-rom. The bios is an old one and will not allow booting from USB. Does anyone know of a way for me to install?
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Mar 31, 2011
I know Ubuntu can be installed from a USB thumb drive but I have a unique problem. My CD drive in my laptop doesn't work any longer and I have no way to replace it. I know I can place Ubuntu on the flash drive but the bios in my laptop does not allow booting from USB and not ROM update for the laptop. So my question is, since this laptop does have Win7 on it, I can partition the drive to make room for a dual boot, but how do I get Linux on the new partition with out a CD Drive or bootable usb?
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Jun 18, 2010
"In this tutorial you will prepare a USB flash drive to make it bootable. After you booted it it shows you a menu where you can choose which live system you want to boot. So you might be interested in this tutorial if: You want to have multiple live systems on one USB flash drive In the future you want to create a new bootable live system just by copying the ISO file onto the drive and edit the grub.cfg You don't want to or can't use Distro specific LiveUSB creator tools You prefer a cleaner solution than the most LiveUSB creator tools which create several folders and files at the device root You are feeling bored and want to see cool features of Grub2 If you have a Grub2 version with Lua support you even don't need to manually edit the grub.cfg when you add new or remove live systems." Remainder of information is found here: [URL] This was found in a closed Karmic Development forum - can this be validated and updated if needed for Lucid?
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Jun 24, 2010
For some reason, Ubuntu 10.4 LTS cannot boot normally, so I have reverted to a live CD, no concern, I can just reinstall, what I am concerned with is the fact that I get my music. I load up the live CD, and I am able to access my hard drive, but I as I found my music folder, I cannot copy and past and/or move ANY folders into a flash drive. It says I do not have permission.
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Feb 28, 2011
I have a big problem with my ubuntu linux.. last night i was trying to execute a windows aplicacion (with wine).. suddenly the pc turned off.. later i turned it on but i couldnt enter to ubuntu... now i want to format my pc but i need to save some files on my flash drive.. because i cannot enter to ubuntu so i can save those files.. I used the Live CD, actually im using the live cd right now... the problem is that i dont know how to acces to my hard drive so i can save those files. every time I try to acces, this error appears...
Unable to Mount Location
DBus error org.gtk.Private.RemoteVolumeMonitor.Failed: An operation is already pending
I tried with right click>Mount... but this error appears..
Unable to Mount Location
DBus error org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.NoReply: Did not receive a reply. Possible causes include: the remote application did not send a reply, the message bus security policy blocked the reply, the reply timeout expired, or the network connection was broken.
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May 28, 2010
I have two 3 hard drives, one with Linux Mint, one with Fedora, one with Windows. For some reason, I can only choose Mint or Windows in the menu at the start. Also, when I boot on mint, I see my hard drive with Windows:
320 GB Hard Drive: 320 GB Filesystem.
But for the hard drive with Fedora I only see:
1.0 TB Hard Drive: 524 MB Filesystem.
From Mint I can go in this filesystem and there is a folder name Grub, can I take the info there and paste it into Mint's grub ? If so, how ?
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Jan 15, 2009
I installed a new hard drive to my system. I use a program called R-Drive image to copy all my os to my new drive. It done a pretty good job too, its an exact copy. I deleted the old one. But obviously now I cant boot. I had a look at the menu.lst file i dont know what to change it to. heres my drive setup,
C: - Windows Vista - Ubuntu
D: - Documents - Swap File
E: - Games
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Mar 14, 2011
I'm mostly a linux-idiot but I tried to get an update for a laptop that was running xubuntu. Anyway, it won't boot and instead takes me to a screen where it says "press s to skip mounting, or press m to recover manually" or something like that. I've pressed S, and then it tells me that it can't find /tmp or something, and I have to turn it off and back on to do anything. Pressing M doesn't help much either... at least not for a mostly-linux-idiot like me. I would do a clean install, but there are a few files I absolutely have to have from the hard drive. recover the files I need from my hard drive to a usb drive while using a Live CD?
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May 25, 2011
A recent update messed up my Ubuntu (actually Xubuntu) laptop, and so I want to recover a few important files off of it before reinstalling the OS.I cannot boot into Ubuntu on my hard drive, so I put in one of my Live CDs, but couldn't figure out how to get the files from my hard drive.I googled the problem, but all the solutions talked about recovering Windows files with a Live CD.I need to recover my files that were in Ubuntu
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Aug 17, 2010
I have a 250 gig usb hard drive. I would like to install Mandriva and Open Suse 11.3 on it, is this possible and how do I get the systems loaded. I got Mandriva installed, but when I tried Open Suse it trashed my Mandriva, i.e. I couldn't boot into it.
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Jan 22, 2010
I did an installation of SUSE 11.2 on a new SCSI hard drive. Keeping the old hard drive separate. I remembered there was some info on the old hard drive I wanted. I added this to the system and mounted a partition. I then copied the data over. Then I umounted the partition rebooted the machine and removed the hard drive. However the machine will now not boot without this hard drive even though its not mounted. Not sure what the error message I am given means I think it could be trying to fchk it. Do I need to do something more like remove /dev/sdd?
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Aug 3, 2009
I seem to have a complex issue on my hands that i can't figure out. first, i wasn't able to get access to my LVM'd hard drives via SSH without half of the content being missing or locked out (read-only or unable to open at all). the problem then went up to being unable to boot up - all i got was a long slew of [100.1234] ata1.00: error messages (they eventually DO stop once they get to around 998.234234 or whatever, and then i can log in and it seems to be "stable").
Part way through this rebooting ordeal i realized / decided to make power-on-self-test stop and wait if it finds errors (via bios) - that showed me that my 750G SATA drive is "bad" and my two (older) 120G & 250G IDE drives are "ok". i then unplugged the SATA drive, rebooted, and didn't see those error messages. however, my LVM was still obviously not coming together (since LVM was made up of the 120G, 250G, and 750G drives)
So, now it seems:
a) I can't boot smoothly with all drives in place
b) I can't do anything with lvm if i remove the 750G sata
c) With all drives hooked up, i can wait 10mins for the errors to go away, but STILL can't do anything with lvm
d) I need to recover the lvm stuff so that i can nicely migrate ALL those files (1.1TB of it) onto a new 1.5TB drive and do away with lvm
This is all running ubuntu 7.10 server edition (32-bit version on a 64-bit computer). i DID post a question on the ubuntu forum as well but so far got no replies at all.
Here's a few pics of the booting process, with one or two "fail" lines showing.
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Oct 4, 2010
I just setup an old computer with Suse 11.3. My goal is to store all my movies and stuff on the Suse box and access them through my home network. I have 11.3 installed, got the network setup and working, can access the internet, access files to/from my laptop to Suse box, and can even access movies/files on the Suse box from my WD Live media box. The problem is: when I add an external drive to the Suse box my WD Live does not totally 'see' it. he external USB drive is accessable on the Suse box as I've moved files to and from this external USB drive. The drive is a WD MyBook. I setup sharing in Samba and the WD Live sees the drive but cannot see the files. Is this a permission thing? Pretty sure I setup Samba correctly as I share several directories in the Suse box.
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Feb 7, 2010
What i really need to know is if there is a way to access a Ubuntu file system on a hard drive from a live CD. When i acess it now it just shows the Windows files on it, and i cant access the Ubuntu partition. What happened was this: I was trying to install Ubuntu on an external hard drive. I moved all the settings to the Hard drive so i didnt think it would affect my other drives. I mustve missed one of them because insteading of loading GRUB like it normally does, it came up with GRUB error 21 and did nothing. I tried to fix it, but nothing worked. I finally decided to unplug everything except the external and install it from there, so id atleast have a functioning desktop. As it turns out, my comp doesnt suport USB booting. So the only way i can use my computer is by Live CD. I was trying to fix things so i had both hard drives power supply unplugged. being slightly drowsy from staying up late that night, I plugged them in while my computer was on. the first one went in just fine, no problems. The second one though, also my master drive, i was having troubles pluging in. while i was turning it to fit in, it made a big spark and shocked my master drive. That drive had my MBR and Windows on it. Now It cant find a MBR, and i cant access the ubuntu partition on my slave drive. Is there any way to save this?? im 99.9% sure ive screwed myself over hardcore epically, but im hoping to save at least 1/2 my data.
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Jun 10, 2010
Is there a way to install grub2 from a linux live cd when linux isn't installed on any of the partitions? I'm setting up a multiboot partition for someone and I don't want to install linux anywhere on the computer since hard drive space is running short.
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