Ubuntu Installation :: Grub Installs On Wrong Disk And Overwrites Win 7 Mbr (more Than Once)
May 20, 2010
I recently bought a new Gateway desktop. I use mostly Ubuntu but like to boot into Windows once in a while. Have used Ubuntu as my main OS for about 3 to 4 years, dual booting. After the Ubuntu 10.04 release, I decided to throw in another hard drive into the new computer and make it dual boot.
Mistakes:
1. I did not create the Gateway Recovery Disk in Windows before installing Ubuntu.
2. Installed Ubuntu 10.04 without disconnecting the Windows 7 drive.
3. The Ubuntu install never prompted me asking where to install Grub (apparently there is an advanced menu somewhere in the install process that lets you select), and it was installed to the first drive on the PC by default, which happened to be the Win 7 drive.
This left the Windows 7 unbootable because it did not appear in the Grub menu. I did some searching and managed to install Grub on the second drive (the one with the Ubuntu install) and also managed to add Windows 7 to the Grub menu so I could boot into Windows. This last procedure added the Windows 7 option to the Grub on both drives.
I then managed to fix the Windows 7 mbr using /fixmbr and /fixboot. The problems I still have are as following. I can't create the Windows Gateway Recovery Disk in Windows. Every time I try, I get a message telling me "Hard drive configuration is not set to the factory default. Restore aborted.". I already disconnected the Ubuntu drive but get the same results. I know this one is not a Linux issue, but maybe someone had a similar issue and might be able to help.
The next problem I have is that it looks like after the las Kernel update in Ubuntu, Grub overwrote the Windows 7 mbr again. Is there a setting file somewhere that now tells Ubuntu that Grub is installed in two places and that whenever there is an update it updates both? Can I change this? I really would like to avoid re-installing Ubuntu to fix this.
I was installing Ubuntu 9.04 64bit server from the CD on a machine that I normally run ESXi on. I wanted to test disk speed on a direct install vs. the install in ESXi, so I installed a 4th hard disk, shutdown ESXi, and installed Ubuntu directly on the new disk (4th Bios disk - SCSI:3 or sdd). When I tried to boot from this disk, nothing happened. I rebooted from the ESXi install disk (SCSI:2 or sdc), all was fine. Playing around, I finally found that to boot the ubuntu install, i had to boot from SCSI:0 - Grub had installed there, even though I never indicated that disk for anything during the install. It would be much better if Grub ASKED where it should be install, rather than assuming.
I had an old Windows disk I wanted to see if I could get some files off of. I was a Windows XP installation, but it got a virus of some sort and eventually died completely. I had always wanted to try to get my files off of it so I could wipe it and use it as another drive. Well, I plugged it up in my computer and thought that it would just recognize it as a regular data disk, but instead somehow it got automatically set as the boot drive. The computer went from the BIOS splash screen to blank and back a couple times before booting Windows. I then tried resetting the other drive as the boot drive and also unplugging the Windows disk with the same result: an MBR error screen.
I fixed the issue by reinstalling the MBR with the repair tools in the openSUSE disk but I am really curious if anyone knows why this happened. Is it a Windows issue or a motherboard issue or perhaps something else?. My old computer was about 7 years old but this new one is well, brand new. So I haven't had much experience with newer motherboards but I know they have come out with a lot of new features so for all I know they may have something that can detect a Windows install and rewrite the MBR or something. I also wouldn't put it past MS to influence($) MB makers to include such a feature.
The one problem I have now is that the boot options no longer display the kernel version, and the splash screen with the progress bar no longer shows, just the standard text.
I am trying to install Fedora 13 on a new system from CD. DISK 1 runs but terminates without using disks 2-5. There is a system I can access as 'root' but I was not prompted to create a unique user or which packages should be installed.How do I complete the process?
Im trying to do a frugal install off the hard drive (no usb,cdrom) with unetbootin. It installs grub and then will boot the installer but is still tries to find the removable media. Whats going on????
Sorry my previous question wasn't that informative so adding more. I had windows partition and free partition for Linux installation. I got installed windows7 and it installed fine, When I tried installing Ubuntu, I remember selected default options. I gave me default option as it clearly said "1. If you have another operating system (e.g. Windows XP) and you want a dual boot system, select the first option: "Install them side by side, choosing between them at each startup." I thought it would keep Windows as it is and I hit proceeded for installation.
first option: "Install them side by side, choosing between them at each startup." refer [URL] step #4. At the end I am disappointed that I cannot see Windows boot option (Dual boot) It just gives Ubuntu option. I kept 50 GB free space for Ubuntu. Is there any option to recover/switch to windows booting? Or I have lost Windows installation overwritten by Ubuntu?
GRUB2 replaced the boot entry for Windows 7 when I installed Windows XP. I tried to create my own menu entry for Windows XP but it seamed to me that it was superseded by the Windows 7 boot loader. I have a brand new desktop PC - Core i7 processor, 2 TB hard drive, 6 GB RAM.
I don't know how to bring back a menu entry that was over written / Superseded by another OS being detected by update-grub; in this case Windows 7. I installed Ubuntu 11.04 at the end of many other Linux OS's. So it is a Multi-boot setup. Basically Windows XP has replaced the Windows 7 boot entry in the GRUB 2 Boot menu after running update-grub.
Then to get Windows 7 back I booted off the Windows 7 Install DVD and used the boot repair option. This then changed the working Windows XP Boot Loader to boot Windows 7 which I wanted but there was a catch. Windows XP didn't boot any more because it was replaced / Superseded. The Linux OS's boot fine.
However, I think grub may have installed to my media drive and not my main HD.
Here is the output of fdisk -l:
Code:
dev/sda1 is my media drive and I think during setup grub-install may have been automatically run on /dev/sda1. If this is the case,
1) How can I remove grub from sda1 and install it on sdb? 2) Should it be on sdb1 or sdb2? 3) Can I change the naming so my main drive is sda and my media drive is sdb?
I have a system with two hard drives: an old one with XP and Ubuntu on it, and a new one on which I have done a fresh install of XP. The BIOS is set to boot off the new drive. I have now installed Ubuntu Studio 10.04(off an alternate install disc, not a live CD)onto a partition on the new drive. The installation went fine, but it appears to have written the GRUB bootloader to the old disc. The result is that when I boot up, the system boots straight into XP off the new drive, without ever seeing GRUB. I could reset the boot order in the BIOS each time I boot according to which OS I want, but that is cumbersome; also I would like to be able to remove the old drive at some point.
What is the easiest way for me to re-install GRUB to the new disc ?
Some days ago I decided to reinstall windows, of course windows wiped Grub of the MBR. No problem. I booted of the live CD (9.10) and tried to reinstall grub, I had Ubuntu 9.10 installed before windows wiped grub. I tried the following tutorial: [URL] My fdisk -l output is the following: root@ubuntu:~# fdisk -l
Disk /dev/sda: 320.1 GB, 320072933376 bytes 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 38913 cylinders Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes Disk identifier: 0x000f2962 [Code]....
sda3 is my root partition, sda2 is the partition where all my media files are located. I mounted /dev/sda3 to /media/root and then I tried to reinstall grub with: sudo grub-install --root-directory=/media/root /dev/sda It came out with no errors, and then I restarted my computer. Grub started, but with a command line. It was the 1,97 beta-4 version. Since I'm quite unfamiliar with GRUB (or really technical linux stuff)
I have a HP Compaq 6710b notebook with W7 on it. I want to use Ubuntu for hobby activities, but as this is a company notebook, W7 should remain intact. I decided to install Ubuntu to an external drive.I set BIOS boot order to CD-USB-HDD.I attached a 2.5" 250GB WD Passport usb hard disk and installed Ubuntu to it from the CD.As a result, the clean install doesn't boot, I get a mere grub console (normal, not rescue).
Examining the situation I learned, that during Live CD session the inner hdd is hd0 and usb drive is hd1. Grub.cfg gets compiled to use /dev/sdb.When booting from usb drive, BIOS makes it to be hd0 and inner hdd becomes hd1 so grub tries to load kernel from W7 partition (and can't find it, I wonder why? )How to fix problem? Although grub.cfg is supposed not to be edited, may I change every sdb to sda in it?
I just updated my server from Ubuntu 8.04 to 10.04 and now it cannot go past grub, at boot time, it would "give up waiting for root device", asking me to check whether I gave the right "root=..." or if I should increase the "rootdelay=..." in the command line argument and end up with the initramfs.
The machine is a Dell Poweredge 2900 with a HW RAID controller (I hope that should not matter, but just in case...). I tried to follow the instructions there to make sure grub is setup correctly, but without any luck.
Below is the output from the bootinfoscript (while running on the LiveCD). Anybody has any idea what can be the problem or what I could do to debug this ? I am running out of ideas.
If I use the super grub disk I can get to my ubuntu partition otherwise my windows partition boots automatically. I spent over an hour in the community documentation using the live cd to reinstall grub and nothing has fixed it. I think that grub is installed and the windows bootloader is just taking precedence.
I have a client who asked me to setup two seperate installations of Ubuntu on his system for him; the intention being that he would have a fall back strategy in the event he screwed something up with the primary install. We have two seperate partitions set aside for each respective distro's / (root) and a large partition that both OS's mount as /home.
Thinking about this just now I have a feeling that what I should have done was added one more tiny partition to house /boot for both OS's. Would that have been the best thing to do? What is happening right now is both / partitions have a /boot folder and the MBR is mounting the secondary /boot folder (from Ubuntu #2) to run GRUB at the startup. The menu list of this /boot folder is giving priority to the instance of Ubuntu we had intended to function as the backup because the size of it's partition is much smaller. Well anyway, I'm going to guess the best way to fix this is to have a /boot partition that both OSs can share, but I don't know how to change the current configuration for both systems to do that.
I've just installed Fedora (F13) for the first time, on a new HDD, to give myself a dual-boot system. So currently I have:
So, at the appropriate stage in the install menu, there is an option for where to install GRUB, and a drop-down to choose which drive is the primary BIOS boot drive.
However, in both cases, no other drive except my new sdc is visible. So, I can install GRUB to MBR of sdc, or to first sector of boot partition - but no option to put it to my primary boot drive MBR on sda.
Likewise, in the GRUB configuration page, if I go to Add another OS, the only option it gives me is my new Fedora install. It doesn't list the Vista OS on sda at all.
The result is that I can boot to either OS by changing the boot drive priority in BIOS.
I guess my question is this: - is this expected behaviour from the installer, meaning that I'll need to configure GRUB manually somehow? (gulp ) or - did I do something wrong in the install process? or - is this some weird bug manifesting itself?
Firstly, I'm ubuntu-naive so things may need to be explained painfully slowly. Secondly, I tried doing a search for similar problems but I had a hard time following the solutions so rather than just jump on another thread I figure i'd start a new one.I am trying to move on from XP and tried setting up 9.10. I did the LiveCD; followed the installtion prompts and installed, and restarted. Following restart I get the following;GRUB loading.error: no such diskgrub rescue>I've tried doing the boot info script lines but I keep getting "unknown command sudo" msgs.I can't get beyond this point.
My boot disk is failing! I am a little nervous, so I'd like to have extra eyes on this so that I don't fubar it.
My setup is as follows, with WinXP and Ubuntu living on completely separate drives:
The boot disk (WinXP with grub2 on MBR) is failing. I need to replace it, pronto.
Do I need to get any data from the MBR on the failing disk before removing it?
Should I make the Karmic disk bootable and install grub on it before removing the failing boot disk?
Once I have Windows (re)installed on a new disc (which will still be /dev/sda) I want to install GRUB2 to its MBR and re-instate the old (current) boot options. How should I do this?
Trying to do a new install of ubuntu 10.10 to my laptop. Installation and all works fine, but upon rebooting, after the bios screen i get:
Code: error: out of disk. grub rescue> I tried using following some instructions i found after googling for the problem: Code: ls (displays the partitions and devices Grub can see) set prefix=(hdX,Y)/boot/grub
[Code]...
but after the 5th step, i get another "error: out of disk" message. The odd thing is that I had an install of 10.10 on this laptop a month ago, and it worked fine. As a side note, I installed fedora 14 after this happened, which worked fine. Reinstalled ubuntu, and it was back to the same problem. I also tried installing with a kubuntu cd I had, to make sure it wasnt the install media, and had the same problem.
I've had this problem on a couple of Ubuntu server upgrades and am keen to get to the bottom of it. Basically, with an Ubuntu 10.10 server installtion where LVM has been used, running through the do-release-upgrade process works perfectly until the reboot stage. Then grub complains with "no such disk" and dumps me out to the grub shell. From here, I can see (from ls) the following:
Code: (hostname-swap_1) (hostname-root) (hd0) (hd0,5) (hd0,1) (fd0) I can enumerate the filesystem on (hd0,1) which seems to contain the /boot filesystem and the filesystem on (hostname-root) seems to contain the / filesystem.
If I execute: Code: linux=(hd0,1)/vmlinuz-image-2.6.38-8-server root=(hostname-root) initrd=(hd0,1)/initrd.img-2.6.38-8-server boot It boots, but into busybox saying that the target filesystem doesn't have requested /sbin/init.
I have a dual boot machine (Win XP + Ubuntu 9.10 on separate physical drives) which was working fine. I now want to replace the Ubuntu 9.10 with LinuxMCE which is based on Ubuntu 8.10. Using the LinuxMCE install disk, I did a fresh install of Ubuntu 8.10 over the top of Ubuntu 9.10 (repartitioning the whole drive). On reboot, I now get a Grub "no such disk" error. I have run the boot info script which produced the following RESULT.txt:
Code: Boot Info Summary: => Grub 2 is installed in the MBR of /dev/sda and looks for (UUID=6a59ab9e-041f-41e2-b27c-02b8ada4c1af)/boot/grub. => Grub 0.97 is installed in the MBR of /dev/sdb and looks on the same drive in partition #1 for /boot/grub/stage2 and /boot/grub/menu.lst. => Windows is installed in the MBR of /dev/sdc
I have windows 7 installed in my internal laptop hard disk and I have installed Ubuntu 9.10 "the Karmic Koala - released in October 2009 and supported until April 2011", on my external hard disk. The problem I am facing is that the GRUB have been installed on the hard disk, for that reason if my laptop have restarted I need the hard disk to be attached to it to load the GRUB and to log in to windows. I need guidance in moving the GRUB to my internal hard disk or return the windows boot loader in charge, so I can boot my windows without the hard disk.
I hope I'm wording this issue clearly.I'd like to plug a disk (IDE or SATA) into an adapter that lets me plug it into my workstation via USB. (E.g. N82E16817153071 at newegg) It will show up as /dev/sdX where X is some arbitrary letter depending on what other disks the system happens to have.
I'd like to have a script then partition, format and copy files onto it. Then we need to install GRUB on it.
Then I will remove the disk and install it permanently into a different computer, here it will either be /dev/hda (if IDE) or /dev/sda (if SATA). However, it seems that in general when you install GRUB on a disk, it assumes it is going to be the same disk that boots??
I am first trying an IDE disk so it will be /dev/hda. I get a "GRUB Hard Disk Error" when booting it as /dev/hda rather than whetever it was on the USB adapter. I used this to install grub:
grub-install --root-directory /mnt/removable/ /dev/sdX Where X was the appropriate letter based on the USB adapter. Then I fixed /mnt/removable/boot/grub/device.map to use /dev/hda../dev/hdc instead of sda..sdc.
I haven't found much about this specific scenario I have so far on the web. I am guessing that stage1 is either attempting to find files based on what the original workstations primary disk geometry was, or it's assuming that the disk is the same location as it was when it was a "removable" one (i.e. /dev/sdX or (hd5) or whatever, when it should just be looking at (hd0).
The goal is to do this kind of installation easily and quickly, and not have to do it individually on each final computer via install CDROM or whatever, or reboot the workstation each time in order to attach the disk as the same location there, etc. (This is a manufacturing setting).
I have benn using ubuntu on an old laptop to run a samba server and a torrent server and it has been working fine till a few days ago when it stopped letting me write any files to the disk, So i tried deleting some of the files i no longer needed to free up some space and the disk usage didnt decrease so i checked it out using the disk usage analyzer and it says its full but i know for sure its not.
I accidently deleted my ubuntu partition, and when boot I get this message:GRUB loading.error:unknown filesystemgrub rescue>I can't get into my bios options either... I just see the MSI splash screen and it cuts right to this error message.
My ubuntu desktop died yesterday. I rebooted my computer in like 1 month and after grub, the screen is all black and it stays there... forever. So I decided to see if the problem persists or not when I completely upgrade my ubuntu to the latest version. So I downloaded the latest ubuntu iso from the site, burned it, and booted from CD and I see several selections to choose from the menu list. The second one was "Install Ubuntu". What I'm worried about is I don't know whether selecting 'Install Ubuntu' will erase all my previous data, or there will be an option to upgrade Ubuntu without erasing all the data. Is it safe to install from the live disk? Will my data be safe? Is there any way to upgrade my Ubuntu on the HD to the latest Ubuntu from a live disk?
I have an old HP PC with 2 drives: Primary (C = 20GB) and a slave (E = 60GB). I have Windows XP Pro OS (which I want to completely replace with Ubuntu). Ubuntu 10.10 is installed on E as a side-by-side (with XP on C). I am done testing Ubuntu and now want to completely replace the XP OS.Ubuntu is installed on E-drive as a partition. ISSUE: When I log on the PC goes directly to the GRUB menu but I get no option to boot from the Live Disk 10.10 during the boot-up.
HISTORY: I have tried (unsuccessfully) to remove Ubuntu from my E-drive by use of the uninstall function from Windows control panel. I have also tried to remove it using the manage/Disk Management process but the "Format" and "Delete" options are unavailable (grayed out) so cannot use that. I would like to do a complete clean up and fresh install of Ubuntu as my only OS.I have read and tried a number of internet articles / recommendations about opening BIOS and redirecting the start-up to the disk, but I do not get any option or any time during the boot to do that.
QUESTIONS: 1) How can I get my HP PC to boot from (recognize) the Ubuntu Live Disk (CD)?
2) Would a complete removal and clean reinstallation be a better approach?
3) And how can I remove Ubuntu from the partition on E (as I want to dedicate the C-drive exclusively for Ubuntu)?
This is my first post so please be patient. I am unfamiliar with this part of the installation process.
My system has Windows XP Pro SP2 installed on /sda1 and originally a 10.04 on /sdb1-3, now upgraded to 11.04. The Ubuntu system works fine (teething troubles with nvidia drivers on upgrade but fixed now), and the Windows system shows up in the grub menu, but when it's selected, I just get `GRUB Hard Disk Error' and nothing else. Windows installed properly, and booted successfully until I installed Ubuntu in the first place. I can still access the files on that drive from within Ubuntu.
I've tried fixboot in the Win Recovery Console, which sounded like it did something, but didn't fix the problem. This problem isn't new to grub2, by the way - I just haven't needed Windows in a year.
