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.
View 3 RepliesI 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?
View 7 Replies View RelatedI'm writing a C program that reads the boot sector of a USB disk. (it is mounted as /dev/sda1). I'm able to read the sector, by the calls code...
The problem is when I wish to write. I use the call:
bytesWrite = write(fd, buf, 512)
The 'write' returns the value of 512, which looks as if the write was successful, yet
when I read again the /dev/sda1 device, I see that no writing was actually made.
Can anybody tell me what do I need to do in order to allow an actual write to the
device?
I have an audio recorder that doubles as a music player. It can play WAV files. So I put in some WAV files and they are out of order, even if they are named numerically. Read somewhere about a little CLI software called fatsort so I installed. The device is located at /dev/sdc. So naturally I write fatsort /dev/sdc, it says something about permission. So sudo fatsort /dev/sdc. Thing is, it says:
Code: sort_fs: Device or resource busy! If I "eject" it (unmount) then it says something about cannot read boot sector or headers. On Windows there is FAT Sorter. It does not work in WINE. So every time I put something in, I have to get to a Windows computer to sort it. It seems like fatsort is the only program that sorts FAT systems in Ubuntu/Linux.
So when i install ubuntu it gets to 47% and than i get this error message. After that the install doesn't really seem to do much.Code:Device /dev/sbd has a logical sector size of 4096. Not all parts of GNU Parted Support this at the moment, and the working code is HIGHLY EXPERIMENTAL.Now i did search and i found another topic where someone had the same problem. His solution was to reburn the CD and try again. I did that and it still got me the same messageP.S. I do have two boot options now however. One for ubuntu and one for windows though i already ran the uninstall.
View 1 Replies View RelatedI'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?
View 2 Replies View RelatedI 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.
View 2 Replies View RelatedI 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?
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?
View 3 Replies View RelatedI 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?
View 9 Replies View RelatedI 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
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?
View 13 Replies View RelatedI 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 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]...
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.
View 2 Replies View RelatedReboot and select proper boot device or insert boot media in selected boot device and press a key. I got this error after: Reducing my Windows 7 partition by about 100gb. Creating a new partition (100gb) and copying my Ubuntu partition (10gb) to the new partition. After it was copied, and pasted, the original partition was deleted. I now had two partitions a new 100gb Ubuntu partition and a 600gb (or so) Windows 7 partition.
All of this was done using a bootable USB with Ubuntu 10.10 and GParted partition editor. Now when I boot I get the "Reboot and select proper boot device or insert boot media in selected boot device and press a key." error.
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..
View 8 Replies View RelatedInstalled ubuntu 10.4 over previous ubuntu on Intel 945G. After installation and reboot the system does not boot: "no bootable device - insert boot disk and press any key".
Installation was done from USB-stick, prepared by UNETBOOTin. I have two HD's, one used for system + storage, another one just for storage. I manually deleted previous system partitions of previous ubuntu install in system HD. The system HD had about 1/3 of free and unallocated space for system partitions, which ubuntu installer created during the installation.
I tried to reinstall grub from bootable USB-stick and it succeeded but it did not help. The system is still not bootable.
I have used ubuntu for years and never happened something like this. Am I missing something or is ubuntu missing something???
HW failure is ofcourse possible but I am quite skeptical about it because Live ubuntu from USB-stick works well.
i had a working multi-boot system, vista on sda1,2; swap sda3; ext=sda4; ubuntu sda5; fedora sda6; data sda7 - i mount the data partition when using all of the linux releases so i don't have to have multiple copies of music, docs, etc. everything has worked fine until yesterday. i tried to install fc12 on sda6, replacing fc11. it required me to format sda6 as ext4. i wasn't sure where i had grub installed, but have a backup of menu.lst in data (sda7), so figured i could let it install to mbr or wherever it wanted to by default. when the install completed and i reboot, i get a black screen and these messages: CLIENT MAC ADDR: 00 19 XX XX XX GUID: XXXXX PXE-E53:
No boot filename received
PXE-M0F: Exiting Intel Boot Agent.
No bootable device -- insert boot disk and press any key I tried reinstalling fc12, same exact errors. I then thought maybe the problem had something to do with ext4 partition mixed in with ext3's, so i installed mepis on the sda6, and let it write grub to mbr (i think, not really sure where it wrote it). anyway, i still get the identical black screen. no grub type menu or anything. the screen used to show "DHCP for a few seconds", but doesn't anymore after i disconnected the ethernet cable.........
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?
View 5 Replies View RelatedI run 64 bit ubuntu 9.10. I recently rebooted my computer with a flash drive plugged into a USB port. My question is, could I have got a boot sector virus because of this? What are the symptoms of a boot sector infection? After the incident, I scanned the flash drive with clamav and it didn't detect any viruses. Also, in the BIOS, the hard drive is higher up in the boot sequence than USB mass storage drives. These two things suggest to me that a boot sector virus is improbable. But, recently, when I tried to boot into ubuntu, I got an error message saying that /dev/disk/uuid<some characters here> didn't exist.
Is this a symptom of a boot sector virus? So, I ended up re-installing ubuntu and I believe grub was written to the MBR. Will this have erased any boot sector viruses that were on my system? Can a boot-sector virus affect linux too? How can I check to see if I have a boot-sector infection? I also have windows xp on my computer. For some reason, windows xp isn't letting me install any updates, but this has been going on for since before the above incident with the flash drive and therefore I don't think that is due to a boot sector virus.
I was using the disk utility on Ubuntu 10.04 and wanted to make by 500GB external NTFS formatted USB drive into 1 x 50GB FAT32 and 1 x 450GB NTFS. I clicked the option that said format or create a partition and it basically wiped the whole thing in a split second leaving me with 500GB of seemingly empty space. Obviously the files are still there but I cannot boot the drive to view anything. I have downloaded testdisk, but don't know how to use it, but I am sure there is a relatively simple solution here. I am currently repairing the boot sector of the drive as Test Disk showed the drive as "no type" i.e. not FAT/NTFS/ext4 etc., but shows the correct amount of used space though, but I cannot view anything err go, I cannot use the undelete command as yet.
View 2 Replies View RelatedHere's the set up.
1. Got an EXISTING LILO... VL 5.8 (/dev/hdc3)
2. Installed VL6.0 and installed its own lilo on Boot sector (/dev/hdc13)
3. Everytime I choose VL6.0 in my existing LILO (/dev/hdc3) it still goes to VL6.0's LILO. The question is, how can I remove the VL6.0 so if i choose this on my existing lILO. It will just boot straight.
VL6.0 LILO:
root:# cat /etc/lilo.conf
# LILO configuration file
# generated by 'liloconfig'
# Start LILO global section
boot = /dev/hdc13
#default = linux
#compact
#prompt
#timeout = 0 .....
Title says it all, I get that "un..." when trying to convert an .img file to .iso, am I doing anything wrong here?.
View 3 Replies View RelatedI recently installed 11.3 on an external drive. After adding some software in yast (searched Kernel and checked every option), I was prompted to reboot but the no boot sector found error came up. Tried reinstalling with the same result. Grub is boot loader
View 8 Replies View RelatedI have three disk in my system. One SATA (250GB) and two SCSI (73GB) disks. The Two SCSI disks were installed originally and RHEL3 is installed on it. The SATA disk is installed a few years later with RHEL5. As you can see below, the boot sector is still on one of the SCSI disks (sdb1).
Filesystem 1K-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda1 236545184 15259760 209075624 7% /
/dev/sdc2 68539636 4578792 60479160 8% /users
/dev/sdb1 101089 26847 69023 29% /boot
/dev/sdb3 68437272 36963704 27997104 57% /RHEL3U7
tmpfs 2025916 652 2025264 1% /dev/shm
How I can move the boot sector from the SCSI disk (sdb) to the SATA disk (sda) without losing data and without re-installation?
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]...
I used to have 2 HDDs for ubuntu: 1 x 80GB and 1 x 500GB The 500GB disk was my /home directory and is now used exclusively for Windows 7. I have now moved /home to the 80GB drive and have modified /etc/fstab to point /home to /home rather than /dev/sdb1. However, I cannot boot into ubuntu. I have tried using Super Boot Disk cd-rom but still no joy. I think I need to fix grub and have tried by booting into a Live-CD and following a tutorial I found on the forums but it complains about not being able to find a device.map I guess this has something to do with the fact that the 500GB HDD is now gonoe but am not sure how to resolve this issue. how to recreate this file but the command failed.
View 2 Replies View Related