Ubuntu Installation :: Setting Up GRUB2 With Multiple Hard Drives ?
Jul 28, 2010
I have been trying to move away from Windows2000 on Ubuntu for months. I have a few applications that I run on Windows that I have been unable to find usuable equivalents on Ubuntu eg Outlook/Mobile sync application required for my job and a DVB TV card application for home. So it looks like I am stuck ruuning W2K and Linux for at least a while and indeed I have been using GRUB2 to select between W2K and Ubuntu.
I need some basic advice about setting up GRUB2. My philosphy when it comes to PC data is you can never have enough backups and I avoid any single point of failure. So I have always used two hard drives which I keep in sync almost daily with FreeFileSync. I also swap my most critical encrypted data between a laptop and desktop. Then I also alternate external USB drives stored away from my home.
My current partions are
When I installed on the Ubuntu 500GB I let it & GRUB2 take the default options so it boots from Hd1 and I assume certain executables are stored at the begining of the Ubuntu partition as well as configuration files in its file system.
Now I'm replacing the 500GB with a 1.5TB and the old 500Gb will become my backup drive. I want to keep the backup drive bootable in its onw right. If either hard drive fails I want a bootable system and acccess to my data.
So my plan is to use the following partitions.
I can install W2K on the 1.5Tb from scratch or use Acronis to restore an image file. Then I can install Ubuntu from scratch.
OK now for my questions.
1) Can I get GRUB2 to put its executables and configuration files on a small partition of its own? I see no reason why they should be dependant on a specific Ubuntu partition. I have read posts mentioning this but not sure if this has to be a bootable Linux or just a file system with the config files.
2) Can I run update-grub on any Linux and store or copy the config files to the partition in 1?
3) I will use BIOS to determine which hard drive is first to boot. When I run update-grub (or when it runs during the new Ubuntu install on Hd1) I dont want GRUB2 to do anything with Hd2, not even know Hd2 exists, it that an option?
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Mar 18, 2009
i am new in Linux. i have two drives one IDE and other SATA in my computer.i want to keep windows XP , WIndows 2003 server on one drive and two flavours of linux on the other drive, let say oopen suse and redhat.please help me how i install these sofwares to make multi boot the machine.
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Dec 27, 2010
I have been trying to install Ubuntu on my new computer as a duel boot with Windows 7. My computer has four 1TB hard drives, One with Windows 7 installed, two that are used for storing media (both are independent, not in a RAID or anything like that) and one empty hard drive. This hard drive contains a 901.51 GB NTFS partition, and 30.00 GB of Unallocated space, I wish to install Ubuntu in this unallocated space; giving it 20 GB (the 10 GB left over might be used for installing XBMC Live). But when I boot Ubuntu's Live CD the installer doesn't show me the unallocated space, and doesn't really show me any of the extra Hard drives.
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Jan 23, 2011
I have 3 hard drives installed to my system, 1TB, 2TB and 500GB drives with the following configuration:
ledi@ledi-ubuntu:~$ sudo parted /dev/sda print
Model: ATA SAMSUNG HD103UJ (scsi)
Disk /dev/sda: 1000GB
Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B
Partition Table: msdos
[Code]...
I can boot to the Ubuntu installation in the 2TB drive. My problem reversed when I reinstalled grub to one of the Ubuntu installations in the 1TB drive. I can boot to any of the OS's in the 1TB drive, but not to the Ubuntu in the 2TB drive. The error message is the same as above. I have no idea what am I doing wrong and I would be really grateful for any assistance.
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Apr 29, 2011
My computer has 2 40GB hard drives (yes, it's really old). One of these hard drives has Ubuntu installed on it, and I would like to use the second hard drive as a data storage device that is usable by anyone who just wants a random place to drop random stuff. How do I do this?
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Aug 12, 2009
I have what will soon become a file server here running Mandriva 2009.1 and I need to set it up for use. There are 6 physical drives, sda-sdf. According to my fstab (pasted below), the OS is installed on sdb.. and for some reason I have a swap partition on sda and sdb. I had a horrible time getting a working installation, and that's probably leftover from a previous attempt.
Question 1: Can I simply edit my fstab to remove the swap on sda, effectively confining all system resources to sdb? The end result I want is all storage space over all drives accessible from a single mount point which can be accessed over the network.
Question 2: Once I sort out the weird fstab, what's the best way to go about setting this up? I imagine I need to format & partition the other drives (all but sdb).. but as far as organizing the free space, what's the best way? Is it possible to have multiple physical drives accessible from a single mount point? Or will the users have to use each drive separately? I was thinking I could create a directory on sdb (in /home?) to use as a root for the network share, and then automount the other 5 physical drives there. Does that make sense?
Code:
/etc/fstab:
# Entry for /dev/sdb1 : UUID=7461ae34-aaa1-443d-82e1-fc9000afcc42 / ext3 relatime 1 1
# Entry for /dev/sdb6 : UUID=41535e04-0368-4682-ab9c-5f791bfea803 /home ext3 relatime 1 2
/dev/cdrom /media/cdrom auto umask=0,users,iocharset=utf8,noauto,ro,exec 0 0
none /proc proc defaults 0 0
# Entry for /dev/sda5 : UUID=9edbc49b-302c-43c8-8264-ed49a7f1fff2 swap swap defaults 0 0
# Entry for /dev/sdb5 : UUID=b7039857-dfae-4a92-8ff4-9d1cdcf25351 swap swap defaults 0 0
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Oct 9, 2010
I have a second hard drive that I plan on placing in a computer I wish to use this computer as a server so my question is how could I use these 2 hard drives as one lets say one is 80Gb and the other is 40GB how could they be shown as 120GB instead of being seperate The installation of server planned on being used is 10.04.
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Mar 25, 2011
I am running Ubuntu on a box with a couple of hard drives, and on a network where we have another Ubuntu machine and a couple of windows boxes. I use filezilla to upload files to other web servers but filezilla will only access files on my main hard drive, not on the second drive and not on the rest of the network.
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Apr 19, 2011
I am just trying F-Spot because a novice ubuntu friend needed help. ubuntu 10.04.2. As a test, on my PC, I have pasted some photos into a particular test folder in my current Ubuntu (in my user folders). I have also nominated a folder as a destination for imported photos. After starting F-Spot, I try to use the test (source) folder in F-Spot with the intention of importing the test photos.
I am using a PC with three hard drives. One has various distros installed, mostly ubuntu versions, all in their own partitions. The other two hard drives are ones I use for data, including backups. They are both continuously mounted. However, the import 'file finder' facility only lists the two data drives, it does not list the current home user folders, which is where my test (source) folder is(!!!)
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Jul 13, 2011
I am thinking of building a new computer. I have been using Ubuntu for a couple years now, but I am not good with the terminal usage. Nevertheless, if I was to go back to Windows I be lost. My Computer would be:
Motherboard = Micro ATX
Hard Drive 1 80GB = Operating System
Hard Drive 2 250GB = Home (my documents)
Hard Drive 3 500GB = Media (videos, music & pictures)
I would like the file to end up on the desired hard drive automatically. And my main menu to display accordingly. In other words, when I click over music, under places in my computer menu, for the computer to know which hard drive to go to. The reason for wanting this setup is, to provide security for the OP, separate my private documents from my music and videos. Now I am using external hard drives. But, it just do not look right, besides the menu is funky.
Would I have to use a RAID set-up or just the partition tool. Does anyone knows of a post or tutorial on how to accomplish this? (plain English would be better).
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Sep 1, 2011
I am doing a new build with an SSD / HDD combo, and I am wondering, is there a way I can install Ubuntu spread across both drives? I know I can do this in Fedora, but I haven't seen much of a feature like this in Ubuntu.
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Dec 20, 2010
How to mount multiple external HDD's. I'd like to link or mount the music, torrents, and general files from several external hard drives and apply permissions (in some cases I only want the mount or link to be read only).
My setup:
- Seagate Dockstar running Debian squeeze (it's headless so I don't have a gui running)
- Two external HDD's with one partition on each (250GB and 400GB)
What I'd like to accomplish:
1. Mount the external HDD's to /media/HDDs as read/write (this is already working using udev and autofs and it's available in samba)
2. I'd like the MUSIC directories on both external HDD's to show up under the same mount point. In other words I want the MUSIC folders (from both HDD's) to appear as one large library of music. And I only want this to be readonly. It will be used as the library for mpd and/or squeezebox.
3. Mount a directory used to download torrents to. I'll probably pick on HDD as the target for torrent dowloads. But let me know if you have any other ideas regarding this.
Since I have the first one done, how would I accomplish 2 & 3?
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Aug 1, 2011
My questions begin with Virtual Box. I have Windows XP installed via Virtual box. Ordinarily, I hate everything about windows, but unfortunately some things related to my job I am still in need of having some access to some form of Windows. I am wanting it to recognize all of my multiple hard drives that are installed on this system, 4 of them to be exact, so that I can utilize files from all of them.
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Jan 18, 2010
I'm breaking into the OS drive side with RAID-1 now. I have my server set up with a pair of 80 GB drives, mirrored (RAID-1) and have been testing the fail-over and rebuild process. Works great physically failing out either drive. Great! My next quest is setting up a backup procedure for the OS drives, and I want to know how others are doing this.
Here's what I was thinking, and I'd love some feedback: Fail one of the disks out of the RAID-1, then image it to a file, saved on an external disk, using the dd command (if memory serves, it would be something like "sudo dd if=/dev/sda of=backupfilename.img") Then, re-add the failed disk back into the array. In the event I needed to roll back to one of those snapshots, I would just use the "dd" command to dump the image back on to an appropriate hard disk, boot to it, and rebuild the RAID-1 from that.
Does that sound like a good practice, or is there a better way? A couple notes: I do not have the luxury of a stack of extra disks, so I cannot just do the standard mirror breaks and keep the disks on-hand, and using something like a tape drive is also not an option.
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Aug 8, 2010
How is this supposed to work out? I noticed some distros are really good about recognizing your other linux distros and some not. They keep recognizing windows, but not other linux distros. Also, I have run into a few problems when my operating systems were on different hard drives. I have my operating systems running from a small 250gb laptop hard drive with special mounting and am using my TB hard drive for internal storage /data.However, my last attempt at installing a linux partition on the TB hard drive with Windows and another linux partition on the laptop hard drive didnt work out so well. Updating grub via the command line didnt sort this out. Sudo su root Apt-get update grub (or grub update) or whatever didnt work before when I tried it.
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Mar 4, 2011
I am using an Abit NF7-S V2 mobo to set up my dual boot system where each OS (XP & Ubuntu) will run on a totally separate HD (as opposed to both OS�s being set up on one HD). Since they will be running as stand alone boot drives, how does one set it all up so that one can boot from one or the other? I don�t see how I can do it from the bios. How do I do it?
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Aug 9, 2011
I tried doing a search and couldn't find anything relatively recent on the topic so here is my question.
I am fairly new to the linux world and am in the process of trying out a couple different distributions. I am doing this by installing them to an external hard drive. This allows me to test them out without affecting my main system in any way. I have already tried openSUSE and it installed with no problems. I am trying to install Ubuntu, however when the installation tries to install GRUB2 it fails asking me for a different location to install it to.
When installing I unhook all drives from the computer except for the dvd drive, usb drive I'm installing from, and the external hard drive I am trying to install Ubuntu to. I'm not sure what else may be of use.
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May 23, 2010
Having a little problem with 10.04 installation. I have two hard drives installed on my PC. One that had Hardy Heron and one data. When the install program launches from a CD boot, it fails and drops me to a live session to check out the problem. I can see both drives and mount them but if I then launch the installer, it does not give either as an option for installation.
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Jul 18, 2010
When i try to install ubuntu 10.04 on my desktop i get through the first 3 steps which are Language, Region, and Keyboard. when i get to Prepare partitions, there is nothing there (same problem with 9.10). I followed the steps of another thread about removing the raid settings and I am sure i did that correctly but it did not work, when i try to find my drives in terminal they can not even be found.
Both of my drives are SATA, one is 250gb, other is 500gb. They are both recognized by other operating systems. I have switched the SATA headers that they are plugged into. I really am just not sure what else to do here. Im not totally stupid at linux, ive been using it for a few years and i have taken two classes for linux in the past year. I really feel dumb for not being able to figure this out :/
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May 1, 2011
Alright so i'm trying to install ubuntu 11.04 except it's not recognizing my hard drives. I have two 80gigs plugged in via sata. And neither of them are being recognized by ubuntu. I have tried plugging them in together, and separately, still nothing. I'm getting pretty frustrated. Ubuntu 11.04 just doesn't seem to be working for me. I can run from the liveCD, but i get no unity desktop environment
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Sep 1, 2011
I am installing Ubuntu on my server that has 2 2tb disk drives. My plan for this server is to set it up as my web server (using apache), will need a mysql database and would like a ftp site. I could really use some advice on how to partition the hard drives.
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Jan 8, 2010
So, at the moment I have a 7TB LVM with 1 group and one logical volume. In all honesty I don't back up this information. It is filled with data that I can "afford" to lose, but... would rather not. How do LVMs fail? If I lose a 1.5TB drive that is part of the LVM does that mean at most I could lose 1.5TB of data? Or can files span more than one drive? if so, would it just be one file what would span two drives? or could there be many files that span multiple drives drives? Essentially. I'm just curious, in a general, in a high level sense about LVM safety. What are the risks that are involved?
Edit: what happens if I boot up the computer with a drive missing from the lvm? Is there a first primary drive?
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Jan 21, 2010
I am attempting to install on a HP ML110 box. It has 2 SATA drives installed. From the live cd I can do fdisk -l and see both drives, I can see both from GPated but during the actual install it doesn't see any drives in which to install.
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May 1, 2010
this may be a very stupid question, but. My computer has two hard drives. One has Windows XP installed on it. The other is blank.
Is it possible for me to install Ubuntu onto the second hard drive, and run a dual-boot using GRUB during startup? Or does it only work when both OSs are on the same hard drive?
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May 4, 2010
I would like to install Ubuntu 10.04 on my new 1 TB hard drive. I currently have Windows XP installed on a 160 GB hard drive for things that I cannot do on Ubuntu. I would like to know if it's possible to install the other hard drive, and then dual boot Windows with it? Effectively dual booting across two hard drives. I wouldn't care if GRUB replaces the standard Windows bootloader, just as long as I can choose between the two at startup
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Mar 13, 2011
I installed Ubuntu 10.04 in a Raid 0. The install went fine. When I shut down my machine then boot it back up it shows no raid volumes defined and my hard drives as offline. Then the Disk boot error message. I am new to Unbuntu and I am sure the solution is simple I just need to know what to do.
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Jun 3, 2011
Is there any performance degradation or complications that arise from having Linux installed on a separate, physical hard disk from Windows in a dual-boot setup? I have a computer that I'd like to dual-boot Ubuntu and Windows but the current hard drive is quite fragmented and the Windows partitioner won't allow me to make a partition large enough to comfortably run Linux+several gigabytes of media that need to be stored. The rig, however, may have room for another internal drive, so I thought that having a separate physical disk reserved completely to Linux would be an easy solution. The tech guy at the local computer store suggested there might be difficulties with this configuration because one drive needs to be the "master" and the other a "slave", resulting in boot complications.
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Feb 8, 2010
I've tried to be clever but as usual I didn't think before acting and missed a small detail.
I have recently installed karmic (dual booting with Vista) on my dell xps laptop. The install went fine, I'm very happy with my new OS.
I bought a new Seagate 500GB portable external HDD. I got a bit over-excited and installed karmic on the external drive. This worked fine and I got a lovely (but slow to appear) Grub2 menu showing my vista and both ubuntu options.
My problem is that now, when I unplug the external drive, Grub fails and I get a grub rescue> prompt. So I need the external drive to be plugged in if I want to boot.
It seems I have done something to the grub configuration. I have read around the subject but I am not confident about how best to proceed.
I understand there is an 'advanced' option in the installer which will allow me to choose where to install grub. Presumably I want it on the internal drive so that I can boot without the external one plugged in.
Am I right in thinking I can just pop in my install disk and redo the installation?
If I indicate I want to install Grub on the internal drive, which partition should I aim for?
Will I get a grub option for booting to the external drive?
Will I be able to plug the external drive into a different machine and boot from it?
I haven't done anything with the fresh install on the external drive so I don't mind losing that.
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Mar 26, 2011
I am building a home server that will host a multitude of files; from mp3s to ebooks to FEA software and files. I don't know if RAID is the right thing for me. This server will have all the files that I have accumulated over the years and if the drive fails than I will be S.O.L. I have seen discussions where someone has RAID 1 setup but they don't have their drives internally (to the case), they bought 2 separate external hard drives with eSata to minimize an electrical failure to the drives. (I guess this is a good idea)I have also read about having one drive then using a second to rsync data every week. I planned on purchasing 2 enterprise hard drives of 500 MB to 1 GB but I don't have any experience with how I should handle my data
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May 20, 2015
I'm trying to install jessie on a new computer, but the installer does not see the hard drives. I copied the DVD-1 iso to a usb stick with dd (also tried the netinstall) and it boots, but when I get to partitioning, it only sees the usb drive. If I go to another virtual console and run dmesg or fdisk -l, all drives are seen correctly.
Back up a little - at first I tried the on-board raid, but when the installer couldn't see the drives, I went back into the bios and reset the sata mode to ahci. I've got it set to use bios/legacy OS, or whatever it's called, fast boot is disabled. Even if only one drive is connected, the debian installer does not see it. Then I read up on the fake raid I was trying to use and decided to go with software raid. Can't do that if there's no hard drives listed in the partitioner.
My own installer (refractainstaller) does work, and I've installed jessie with it a couple of times onto one drive, but I really wanted to use raid and lvm, and my installer doesn't do either of those things. No optical drive, but if that's the only way to install, I'll pull the one from my current box and use it for the install. I think I still have a blank CD or DVD lying around.
Hardware:
ASUS H97-PLUS LGA 1150
Intel core i3 (the cheapest one at newegg)
WD Black 1TB drives (2)
GSkill cheap memory, which already passed a memtest.
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