Ubuntu Installation :: Grub Boot Loader Failure On Clean Install
Feb 14, 2010
I'm having a problem installing Ubuntu Studio 9.10-alternate-amd64 onto my machine. This is the third attempt and I keep running into the same problem. Grub Boot Loader will only install to 16% when a screen pops up:
Ubuntu Installer Main Menu
Choose the next step in the install process:
choose language
configure the keyboard
detect and mount CD-rom
etc...
choosing the option "Install Grub boot loader on a hard disk" sends me back to the Grub install and once again at 16% the Ubuntu Installer Main Menu pops up. Choosing the option "Install the Lilo Boot Loader on a hard disk" resolves in an Lilo-install failure and i'm directed back to the Installer Main Menu. The option "Finish the installation" sends me back to the same menu..I'm stumped as to what to do... a disk check ensured me that the instal-dvd is valid though I can't get past this silly install menu.
A friend of mine asked me to install ubuntu on his system as he finally got enough of all the flaws and problems in his vista. I said no problems ill have ubuntu up and running in no time! Well this is 2 days later and still nothing, he's computer refuses to boot from cd, i been changing the boot sequence allot but no indications of it wanting to boot the cd at all, whatever i try. So i made a bootable ubuntu usb-stick, doesnt work everytime i boot but sometimes... i get the load-up-screen, select install ubuntu, go ahead with the install, everything goes like clockwork. "restart is needed" sure, i restart it. grub says something like cant boot, or nothing to boot on hdd.. and thats that. ive reinstalled it several times (10+), trying ext2,ext3,ext4, partitioning it diffrently, ive tried it all. i even took out the scsi hdd, and tried an old ide-drive i had, gave me the exact same error..
i dont have all the specs but ill write what i know:
I installed Windows 7 and then Ubuntu 10.10 64 bits. The Ubuntu installation went fine but when rebooting a "check disk" appeared and since then my PC keeps booting directly on Windows. I tried all the GRUB reinstallation methods of the GRUB2 Community Documentation with the live CD but none worked.
Below is the output of the Boot Info script found on several threads.
I am a brand new Ubuntu user that just tried to install on an old PC using the 10.10 desktop edition.During installation, I hit an error that the bootloader could not install, and after reading about it on the forums, opted to attempt to install it manually after. I have followed the tutorial located here,[URL].. on reinstalling GRUB2 from the liveCD, which I assume means to boot with the installation CD and select try Ubuntu (given the only other option is install, which I have tried twice) everything up to step 5 in that tutorial seems to run successfully, and I am given a message it is installed, but then when I reboot the system it does not open the GRUB2 menu, rather the CLI interface, which suggests there is no grub.cfg
So I am unable to refresh at the GRUB menu because that command is not recognized by the CLI (and it may not help if I am missing files, so I might have screwed up reinstalling them in step 5, or maybe the "Try Ubuntu" terminal doesn't alter the computer like I thought?)
I was installing sqeeze i386 on my laptop VOSTRO 1400 and got this the 'grub-pc' package failed to install into /target/. without the GRUB boot loader, the installed system will not boot.
I have a laptop with windows vista installed on the internal hardrive.Last March I installed wanted to start to use linux so I brought a separate external hardrive partitioned it to enable media storage on one section and installed ubuntu on the other half. It works fine and so does the windows vista on my internal hardrive, however I have to have the hardrive plugged in to boot.Until now this hasnt bothered me, however I've recently started to take my laptop into university and cannot switch it off unless I have the external hardrive with me as I cannot switch it on without it.With it plugged in it loads up GRUB and then gives me the option to load either Ubuntu or windows vista, however if it is not plugged in when I power up it says GRUB loader failed.It also occured to me that if for some reason my external hardrive fails in the future I wont be able to use my laptop anymore.Has the installation of ubuntu (and GRUB) altered the MBR? Is there some way I can edit the settings so that I can load windows vista without the hardrive plugged in, and then if it is plugged in I get the choice which one to load?
under ubuntu how can i install grub boot loader ?is there a program that let me do it ?i would like to add a grub load to an hard disk , and maybe to an usb stick and to a floppy disk
I want install 10.10 Maverick on a new partition alongside my OS X and 10.04 Lucid installs to see if it works on my machine. I'm a little unsure about some things.
1)Do I need to install the GRUB boot loader on this new partition?
2)Can I use the same swap space or is recommended to create a new swap?
I had a dual boot machine with fedora 12 and windows vista and I could use grub boot-loader to switch between two. Few days ago windows got corrupt and I have to reinstall it. I put windows 7 now and as usual it erased grub. So to reinstall I put the fedora 12 installation CD on and followed some usual setup steps. When I got the command line I issued the command "grub-install /dev/sda" (sda not hda because It showed bunch of sda, sda1..) but surprisingly it said grub command not found. I remember doing it before while it worked fine.
Toward the end of installing Ubuntu 10.10 32bit (Alt CD) on my iMac 11,1, the installer asked me to type in the location for installing the grub boot loader.
I told it to use /dev/sda3 and it immediately failed. I'm still in the installer. Can anyone suggest a solution?
Here are my partitions on sda:
...from the shell in the installer, there is no grub.cfg in /target/boot/grub.
I'm using the RAID1 setup, which is configured in the BIOS, as it is a HP Proliant server. i have 2 500GB hard drives configured in a mirror. when booting the install, it recognises this, and deals with it fine.
The problem is, when it gets to the section of installing the grub2 boot loader, it just stops and gives me the "ubuntu installer main menu" where if i select grub boot loader install it just loops back, and if i select LILO installer, it errors, saying an installation step failed.
It has the option to skip installing boot loader, but then, can i get it to boot a different way? can i boot manually into the server install and then install GRUB and hope it works? can i install grub1 rather than grub2?
I have installed Ubuntu 10.10 Minimal on a 2GB USB using CLI and it is working very well after I added a few things. I intend to use it on machines other than my own. But the GRUB boot loader was installed to the main system on my machine and it is booting from there.
During the installation it was said that the bootloader can be installed on a floppy. So I started a new 2 GB stick and tried to install the boot loader on a floppy but my computer does not recognize floppies anymore (seems to be a wider problem with recent distributions).
So I tried to install the bootloader on a different USB stick and and this also did not work. Cannot find recent and relatively easy way to install GRUB boot loader to a stick.
I installed Ubuntu 11.04 64-Bit via Wubi but it seems that when I turn on my machine I first get the Windows Boot Loader, when I select Ubuntu from the list it then goes into GRUB with the option to select Ubuntu or Windows. Is there any way to change this so only GRUB is used?
I have XP, Win7 Pro and F 11 installed. Before I installed F 11, Win 7 boot mgr was working fine. I then installed F 11 and I went to System/Admin/bootloader to edit it and it wouldn't bring up the boot loader. In the attachment was the error msg. Now my only option when I boot up is F 11.
I do not have access to the Win 7 DVD only the F 11 install disk since I am on a fishing trip and need to use Win 7. How can I repair to the grub boot loader to boot into Win 7?
I am running Windows 7 and openSuse 11.3 as a dual-boot system. I had to run a Windows 7 Startup Repair, which apparently reset the Windows boot loader, so now I am not getting Grub. How do I reinstall or reactivate the Grub boot loader? I am assuming I have to use the installation DVD?
What I like is to install Fedora13,Win7,WinXp, and Musix. One HD 1.5TB Ilike on that is win7 and Fedora13,the other one with 400GB WinXP and Musix. What should I do so I can setup on GRUB. How can I set up like that.
I got an HP ProBook 4520s that comes with 500 GB with Windows 7.
It comes with 4 partitions: SYSTEM, the main Windows partition, HP Recovery and HT Tools.
I tried to have OpenSuse installation to resize the Windows larger partition but it said that it couldn't with this message:
"The partition on disk /dev/sda is not readable by the partitioning tool parted, which is used to change the partition table.
You can use the partitions on disk /dev/sda as they are. You can format them and assign mount points to them, but you cannot add, edit, resize, or remove partitions from that disk with this tool."
So I resized the Windows partition from Windows 7 and added 3 partitions on the empty space for Linux: /, swap and /home. Still OpenSuSE installation has shown this warning message:
"The bootloader is installed on a partition that does not lie entirely below 128 GB. The system might not boot if BIOS support only lba24 (result is error 18 during grub MBR)."
I configured OpenSuSE installation to install on those partitions but Grub could not install the boot loader with this message: "grub> setup --stage=/boot/grub/stage2 --force-lba (hd0,2) (hd0,2)
Error 17: Cannot mount selected partition grub> quit"
I already tried this in OpenSuSE 11.4 but I suspected it needed newer parted and grub versions, so I also tried OpenSuSE 12.1 milestone 3 with the same results.
The installation finishes but no Grub boot menu appears, it goes to Windows as if no Linux was installed, although the installed version is there in the 3 partitions that were created on Windows, I just cannot make them boot.
I did a fresh install of SuSE 11.4 (WIN7 TOO) and changed my Larger HD1 to the first HD. I was installing and got this error first: the boot loader is installed on a partition that does not lie entirely below 128GB The system might not boot if BIOS supports only lba24 (result is error during install grub mbr) status loc dev/sdb6
I continued with the install and then got:
Yast2 error occured while installing GRUB ver 0.97 (640k lower/3072k upper memory) [minimal bash-like lineediting is supported? for the first word, TAB lists possible command completition anywhere else TAB lists possible completion of a device/filename] grub setup --stage2=/boot/grub/stage2 --force4-lba (hd0,5) (hd0,5) Error 25 disk read error grub> quit
i installed it on a external HDD. my primary OS is windows 7 on my 1 internal hard drive. After i installed ubuntu whenever i boot up my computer i have to have my external hdd plugged in and turned on or else i get "cannot find GRUB" then some rescue thing comes up where i can type stuff. i would just like to move the GRUB loader to my primary hard drive or at least recover my windows loader but have ubuntu on it.
I have installed Linux mint and it failed on grub, if I press something grub crash, tired of that I install Ubuntu but my surprise was the same problem on grub, I was thinking if grub2 was the problem, so I tried grub legacy and was the same x_x
I remember use a old version of ubuntu with lilo (or was opensuse) but it works! but neither last ubunt nor mint with grub
Grub loader: select OS If I press ANY key it crash, if I wait the 9 seconds it enter to default OS (first option)
Note: It is neither PS2 nor USB keyboard, it's a laptop keyboard, a Compaq presario 2100
I tried to install linux on hard disk and it installed without any problem. However, when i boot i directly get the windows boot loader screen and no grub screen. I reinstalled linux. I tried to fix grub, but still no grub screen.
I installed Ubuntu 11.04 on a separate partition, with Grub being in it own partition. When I start the PC only windows Xp is available. So how do I get grub or Ubuntu load with windows xp boot loader? I tried with Live cd, the sudo grub but then it says command not found. I think its because Ubuntu 11.04 uses grub 2.
This is a problem when Windows is running some malware that cannot be removed, which happens all the time. The problem is all the new hardware or specialized hardware will not work on Linux so Windows is the only choice. I would think the latest versions of Linux would have this problem worked out by now. I installed 11.3 one week ago, only to find that the repair option in the install menu no longer exists so don't bother uses this link to reload the GRUB HowTo Boot into openSUSE when it won't Boot from the Grub Code on the Hard Drive. I also tried this link Re-Install Grub Quickly with Parted Magic which does not work either. On step 2 typing grub returns the error message "grub command not found". You can use GRUB if you boot the install DVD and select Rescue Boot. However when you type find /boot/grub/menu.lst the error message "file not found" is returned.
I did the following to restore my GRUB boot record. Boot the install DVD and select the update option during installation. Change all the repositories to enable except the NVIDIA repository, it is not responding at this time. When the system comes up go into Yast and open the boot loader. It should have your original boot menu in memory. Change the default to another option and re-write the MBR. This will write a new MBR using the original data updated with your new default. Re-boot and then change your default back. I am just a NewBe so this may not be exactly correct but I hope it saves someone like me some time fixing a MBR re-writing by the Windows installer.
I have a Dell Inspiron 1721. Recently I replaced Windows Vista Home Edition (32 bit) with Slackware Linux 13.
Lilo wouldn't work, when I turned on the computer it printed "Li" and then 20 lines of 090909... and then the computer would hang up. So I just used my Slackware-boot-flashdrive-thing that I created during installation to boot my computer and told myself that I would fix it later.
Also, when I installed, cfdisk (or it might have been sfdisk) complained that /dev/sda did not contain a valid MS-DOS partition table. fdisk still worked, so I used it to create a new table, and cfdisk worked fine and the installation went along normally.
I reinstalled Slackware about two days later (I realized that I had installed the 32 bit version instead of the 64 bit). Lilo still didn't work.
I thought it might be something wrong with the Slackware DVD, so I downloaded and attempted to install about 4 different distributions. None of the CDs would work. The computer would start up, Linux would start to load, and the computer would freeze.
Xubuntu was the only distro I had that I could get to install. Halfway through the installation, (Surprise!) I got an error, something like "Package Grub failed to install, you will not be able to boot your new operating system".
The rest of the install went fine, so I restarted my computer and tried to use another one of my CDs to boot Xubuntu. I got the error "/dev/sda does not contain a valid partition table", and later "ext4-fs: checksum failed on dev sda at sector...", and "please specify a valid partition for root=". I am absolutely positive that I entered the correct partition, I triple checked and entered other partition names to make sure.
I'd also like to add that the computer makes horrible crunching noises when it starts up and when I do stuff like press keys. So is something seriously wrong with my hardware, or is there another explanation for all of this? Because I really don't want to have to try to repair the computer and can't pay to have it repaired.
I've had to give up trying to install linux. It just won't work on my machine, a Presario 6370us that has been upgraded over the years such that it is not compatible with linux, apparently. (You can read my travails elsewhere on this board; thanks very much to all who tried to help.)
Now, how do I remove the GRUB boot loader from my system? I need the system to boot directly to Windows XP.
I can't start linux in any way, shape, or form, so I need to either edit GRUB inside the GRUB environment itself, or to do so from Windows.
Ideally, I'd like to remove GRUB entirely. Failing that, I'd like to edit the GRUB config file so that only Windows is an option. Failing that, I need to make Windows the default OS.
I successfully installed Fedora 11 from the DVD iso. At the end, the installation program prompts me to reboot the system. But when the boot loader appears after rebooting, there are only the old entries.
I have 2 IDE disks and one sata disk. The first IDE disk is hd0, the second IDE is hd1. The SATA disk is hd2. In the setup, I selected hd0 to install grub. Fedora 11 was installed on the SATA disk (hd2).[edit] I forgot to say, that Fedora 10 is on /dev/sda and Fedora 9 on /dev/sdb