Ubuntu Installation :: Grub Fails To Be Written In Boot Sector / What I Need To Do?
Nov 21, 2010
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?
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Jun 7, 2010
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
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Feb 26, 2010
I've been running openSuse 11.2 for a while on my notebook.Today I turned it off at work and came home. When I tried to turn it on, it boots, shows a black screen written 'GRUB' and then NOTHING. It doesn't complete the boot process.
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Jun 18, 2010
The boot sector somehow got messed up on a friends computer while updating. I used to know how to do it with the old version, but now that they've updated it and changed everything , how do you repair the boot sector from a live-CD with Grub 2?
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Mar 30, 2011
The project was an update of a cluttered dual boot ubuntu/XP laptop to ubuntu 10.10. For work, I sometimes need Windows, regrettably some software needs Explorer or indeed W$ itself to operate.Grub 2 still seems buggy, install was fixed by
Code:
sudo mount /dev/sda6 /mnt
sudo grub-install --root-directory=/mnt/ /dev/sda
[code]...
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Aug 24, 2010
I have installed Ubuntu 10.04 LTS-the Lucid Lynx on top of a Windows XP installation. The Windows partition started before I did this. Now, all I get is a flashing cursor when I tell GRUB to start the Windows XP partition.
I have tried reinstalling Ubuntu with no effect. I have tried repairing Windows using a Windows installation disk.
However, I can reach the files in the Windows partition just fine from Ubuntu.
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Jul 13, 2011
Downloaded Ubuntu 10.04.1 Desktop AMD64, tried to install it to a cleand HDD using the whole HDD, i.e. gave it permission to use the whole HDD. Installation process appeared to run OK but when it came to the restart it just fired up the message
error: out of disk
grub rescue>
I've searched this forum and found numerous references to these error messages but cannot make head nor tail of the diagnostic suggestions. Apart from anything else they suggest strings of command lines which I don't understand and can't enter anyway since they don't correspond to my keyboard layout (if I hit > or ) something completely different appears on the screen). Is there someone here who can provide a step-by-step solution in lay language ? Or is there such a thing as a bootable file which can be downloaded and inserted into my CD drive to correct this problem ?
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Mar 7, 2010
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.
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May 17, 2009
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?
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May 11, 2010
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.
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Dec 19, 2010
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.
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Apr 21, 2011
I have been running a dual boot system with Windows XP and Ubuntu 10.10 64 bit with the dual boot selected by Grub (placed y an Ubuntu install).
Recently I have installed Window 7 Home on a spare disc. My Bios allows me to select which disc to boot.
The Win7 installation has overwritten the boot sector on the WinXP/Ubuntu dic so that it is now not bootable.
I can sse all my Ubuntu files with a Live Linux Disc, so I can get all my files back.
Is there any easy way to re-install Grub or should I just do a clean install of Ubuntu, perhaps to a blank partition?
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Aug 20, 2010
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?
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Apr 30, 2011
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?
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Jul 12, 2011
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?
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Jun 26, 2011
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.
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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,
[code]...
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Aug 6, 2011
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.
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Feb 18, 2011
I am inexperienced in using Linux, and just installed Ubuntu 10.10 on an external hard drive. I didn't want to mess around with re-partitioning my hard drive, which has Windows 7. I figured that I could just run Ubuntu from the external, and if it gave me any problems with Windows, which I unfortunately need for work, I could just unplug it and boot normally. However, GRUB appears to have installed some component to the local hard drive. Whenever I try to boot from the local hard drive, I get this error message:
"error: no such device: 8b84f351-7770-4908-b12f-0cbd31bc3662
grub rescue> "
Another thing is that in the boot menu, only the CD/DVD drive and local hard drive are options, it won't even register the external.
Any suggestions on what may have caused this error? I saw from other posts that GRUB doesn't like multi-drive systems. Also, would it be possible to delete GRUB from my system, then allowing Window's MBR to take over?
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May 16, 2010
i have installed ubuntu 9.10 inside windows vista.now when i start my system i get option to select windows or ubuntu. windows can start successfully but ubuntu start up fails and give grub shell prompt as :
[Code]...
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Feb 14, 2011
with reference to my this thread: [URL]
After installing Windows 7, the GRUB got re-written by the windows bootloader. Now after booting into the live cd and mounting /boot partition (sda2), I tried to reinstall the GRUB with this command grub-install --root-directory=/mnt /dev/sda as told by this [URL]
But I got the an error which says, Are you sure /dev is mounted? then i tried the same command on the / partition (sda5) which said, cannot find boot directory, Are you sure /dev is mounted?
And installation failed, now after restarting its just a black screen with grub> prompt.
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Jan 31, 2010
I installed karmic, then damn small linux - the DSL's loader would not recognize my xubntu automatically, so I got GRUB 1.97 on xubuntu and it recognized my DSL and added it to the menu with 3 alternative resolution options.
Now, xubuntu starts fine, but when I start DSL in any of the modes, I get the following output:
1. 'vga=normal is deprecated use gfxpayload=text before linux command' comes up in the same font as GRUB menu is displayed - but only for a split second, I had to video it to read it!
2. Uncompressing linux... ok, booting the kernel - similarly, disappears before you can read it, and the computer reboots.
Below are my /etc/default/grub and /boot/grub/grub.cfg.
Does all that mean I want to edit /boot/grub/grub.cfg even though I apparently must not?
NB I have some problems with my hard drive, I have to fdisk it a lot but that's probably because my laptop has a dead BIOS battery - I'm having to fdisk it every time I boot up etc. I'm a bit lost with this to be honest! Anyway, please forget the hard drive note unless you seriously suspect it's at fault for GRUB problems.
Code:
Code:
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Feb 26, 2010
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?
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Nov 26, 2015
I have a ~ 2008 notebook (Compaq CQ60-137EL) on which I had Windows 7 only (it was sold with Windows Vista installed).
Later I installed Debian Jessie 8.2.0 Stable ("Graphical expert install" from DVD), along with GRUB as a boot manager (I chose not to install it on the EFI removable media path).
Since then, if I select Windows 7 on the GRUB boot screen, I see "Starting Windows...", and after few seconds the screen flashes for a moment, and then the PC reboots: I see the bios screen, followed by the GRUB screen again.
What's even more weird about this is the fact it just happens only in like ~50% of the cases. In the other 50%, Win7 starts flawlessy.
I even tried to install Debian first, then Windows 7, then re-install GRUB, but I got the same issue, even with both system freshly installed.
On 6 attempts, 3 times it worked and 3 times it didn't.
On my desktop PC I'm in the same setting, but I don't have this issue. I think it may be related with the fact I have Win7 on a SSD and I installed Debian on a separate HDD, while on my notebook, as you can imagine, there's just one single HDD.
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Apr 8, 2011
I am trying to install Ubuntu to an external usb hard drive (WD Elements SE). I am also choosing to install the grub bootloader to this disk (/dev/sdb) because I do not want anything modified on the internal drive. The installation appears to go okay, but when I try to boot to the usb drive, I get the error, "no boot sector on usb device" and it immediately falls back to my interal drive. I have tried this installation with both 10.10 (amd64) and 11.04 (amd64). How can I fix this?
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Jun 4, 2011
I recently purchased a new Lenovo Thinkpad T420i and am having problems installing the latest version of Squeeze from CD. After receiving the laptop, I started it up, configured Windows 7, and confirmed everything is working correctly. Next I went through the Debian installer, which completed successfully. I'll be dual-booting Windows 7 and Debian, so at the partitioning stage I resized my NTFS partition, added a shared VFAT partition, then used the "Guided" install to create my root and swap partitions. My partition layout is code...
I assumed something was wrong with grub, so I booted the CD into rescue mode and chose to reinstall grub onto the Master Boot Record. But nothing changed. Just to experiment, I went into fdisk, deleted all my new partitions (leaving just the Windows ones), and tried rebooting, but the same error happened. I then went through the Debian installer again, being careful to set everything up correctly, but still, the device won't boot.
I'm not even getting to the grub boot screen, so something is wrong even before the point. Reinstalling grub to the Master Boot Record (grub-install /dev/sda) isn't changing anything. How can I troubleshoot this?
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Jan 28, 2010
OpenSUSE is starting to drive me a bit nuts. Actually what I'm trying to do is simply install VMWare server on a recent as possible SUSE and run 2 virtual machines, both the same SUSE. Of course 11.2 32 bit doesn't run VMWare server 2 so it's back to 11.1. The trouble is, 11.1 won't install properly on my PC.
The install process, booted and installed from the 11.1 network install iso image on CD, runs fine. The PC reboots from hard disk and stops at the grub prompt. I've tried the auto-repair option and reinstalled it from scratch a second time always with the same results. It seems the root partition is hosed, and that's where my understanding hits its limits. Can anyone help?
Incidentally should anyone be able to advise on the VMWare conundrum I'd also be interested. Maybe in another thread...
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Apr 29, 2009
It seemed that it would be simple enough: take the 'f' option in the expert menu of fdisk to put partitions in order after a gap had been created by a deleted partition and then make corresponding changes in /boot/grub/grub.conf because the root partition was shifted.
Well, it didn't work out that way. No matter what I try, I either see the error 15 at Stage1.5 or the error 28, which is even stranger (file does not fit into memory). All this before I even see a grub menu. It just does not get that far.
Does anyone want to take as stab at guessing what might have happened here and whether I have a chance at recovering without having to reinstall? I can provide concrete data, if anyone would be kind to give it a try. Hoping that this is a known problem and something can be guessed from what I stated here but I can be as specific as needed, just don't want to generate noise if there are no takers.
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Feb 13, 2011
upon adding the installed VL on the existing LILO.. (btw i have not installed its LILO on the installation setup) since i know that i will just add it to the "existing" LILO the error above arises upon doing the lilo run command.$adding Vector6.0 etc.FATAL : Boot sector of /dev/hdc13 doesn't have a boot signature.i have tagged the /dev/hdc13 bootable via CFDISK. but same problem arises..
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Apr 20, 2011
I'm new to Linux, and I'm trying to install Ubuntu on a PC that was home built a few years ago. It had XP on it and it ran fine, but i wanted to learn Linux, so I decided to install Ubuntu. I've tried a few different versions of Ubuntu, 10.04 and 10.10 to name a couple. 10.04 gets so far and the boxes all close and it sits there. 10.10 fails when trying to install Grub. I did get Xubuntu 9.04 to install but it fails when i do any updates/upgrades/software installation After it fails, it will no longer boot. Just a thought I had could be incompatibility with my mother board? I have a Mercury P4VM800M7 motherboard in it now. Hard Drive is a WD Sata drive that i just purchased brand new.
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