Is there anything different about grub in Kubuntu feisty

[cosbear]

Howdy Everyone:

I build custom computers and servers and have for over 20 years. I have a machine that I run my feisty server on that has several old hard drives on it I use for testing new OS's. I always load the drives to have there own boot sector and use the boot system in the bios to choose which drive I want to boot to avoid problem with grub mostly. I had Kubuntu loaded on one of those old drives which had been used for many other OS's before. After I had Kubuntu on there nothing else would load without failure. I tried to get Linspire6OEM to install and ran into a problem I just can't seem to figure out. It loaded like normal but when I rebooted I got this message:

Internal error: The second sector of stage2 is unknown

This comes up right after Grub loads.

after that it just stops. I have reloaded it and had the same problem. So I decided to try the drive on another machine. Again I had exactly the same result. The ISO download had went smooth and the disc reported binary equal so I assumed it was fine. It also ran fine in Live mode on both machines and as far as I can tell all my hardware on both machines (as well as my laptop) is functioning correctly in the live mode. The two machines have completely different motherboards and one has a 64 AMD XP with 4gigs of ram, the other has a pentium dual core with 2gigs of ram. Since I have loaded that software from the same cd on a new hard disk and it worked just as it should have.

I tried loading other Linux Opperating Systems onto that drive as well with no luck. The I loaded the LinuxMCE DVD, which uses Kubuntu as it's base OS and it loaded like a charm. Then I remembered that I had Kubuntu on that hard drive last. Never seen anything like it. I tried all kinds of software to wipe that drive and it's boot sector with no luck. No Linux opperating system I tried would load, including other versions of Ubuntu. I still don't understand it myself. I'd love to resolve this mystery. I just can't stand not knowing something like this. If anyone out there knows anything about this problem? Or why a disk drive might do this? Or do you know of any software that will definately without question delete the boot sector on a drive that has been used before? Please let me know. Thanks Later... cosbear
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[SheeEttin]

Re: Is there anything different about grub in Kubuntu feisty

It's a problem with Grub itself.
I'd suggest reinstalling it, but I don't know if that'd fix the problem, since "stage 2" is on the filesystem...

[cosbear]

Re: Is there anything different about grub in Kubuntu feisty

It's a problem with Grub itself.
I'd suggest reinstalling it, but I don't know if that'd fix the problem, since "stage 2" is on the filesystem...

Thanx SheeEttin:

I'm using that drive in another machine now running LinuxMCE which runs on top of Kubuntu that loaded on that drive perfectly. I still wish I knew what was so different about Grub in Kubuntu then other versions. I've never had any problems overwriting them. Until this I'd never even heard of a Stage 2. My guess is it is particular to that version of Kubuntu. I'll find out eventually, it will bother me until I understand it. Thanx again. Later... cosbear
__________________
Everything I know is subject to review; especially those things I know about the truth!

Free Source means Freedom, the Freedom of choice, the Freedom to grow, and the Freedom to breath, so exhale deeply.....

[SheeEttin]

Re: Is there anything different about grub in Kubuntu feisty

Nope, Grub's stage 2 is the bit that you see when you ask for the menu. It handles the kernel and initrd load, among other things. It's basically one step up toward the OS.

It's probably just that something went wrong in installation or something got corrupted. Not a big problem by any means.

[cosbear]

Re: Is there anything different about grub in Kubuntu feisty

The only problem with the stage 2 bit is that I can't get rid of it. That was an older smaller hard drive, I was only using to test new linux releases. Kubuntu loaded and ran fine on it. When I was done evaluating it I wanted to evaluate other linux distros on that hard drive. I like kubuntu and I keep it on a virtual machine running on my Ubuntu7.04 server which is up 24/7 so I also use it as my main computer. The problem is that I can't get the stage 2 bit off that test drive so no other linux distro including Ubuntu will run on it. They all load but won't boot afterwards because they get stuck at the stage 2 bit. Which ended that drives life as a test drive, because I have not found any software yet that will wipe stage 2 off the drive. So I put LinuxMCE on it because it runs on Kubuntu. What I hoped was that someone here could tell me how to wipe the drive free of stage 2, so I could load other distros on it. Thanks for trying to help, I appreciate it. I must not have made my question clear. Later... cosbear

[Fintan]

Re: Is there anything different about grub in Kubuntu feisty

The only thing I can think of would be the gparted live cd:
http://gparted.sourceforge.net/livecd.php

delete the boot and any other partitions and reformat the whole disk.

Hope that helps

[cosbear]

Re: Is there anything different about grub in Kubuntu feisty

The only thing I can think of would be the gparted live cd:
http://gparted.sourceforge.net/livecd.php

delete the boot and any other partitions and reformat the whole disk.

Hope that helps

Thanks Fintan:

That was one of the first things I tried. It wipes everything but the boot sector. It does a good enough job of wiping other Linux distros, because grub overwrites the old grub file. My best guess is that maybe the grub file used in Kubuntu because of the stage 2 bit, is longer than the grub files on other distros. It's just a theory for right now because I can't prove it. Every other distro I've tried has rebooted and come up with an error message about stage two and stopped in it's tracks. Except for distros based on Kubuntu; ie, LinuxMCE and Klikit. From everything I have been able to figure out the last generation or two of hard drives have some way of protecting the boot sector from being wiped. I've tried every kind of software I've been able to find to wipe it but still it persists. I even tried loading windows on the drive to get rid of it but Windows just froze on reboot without the error message about stage 2. It was still there afterwards though.

A guy that replied on the Ubuntu forum to this question just gave me a script though that runs from the console which writes numbers to a drive and it fills the entire drive including the boot sector. It just writes blindly to a drive until the script fails because the drive is full. It reminds me of an early dos program that copied copy protected CDs years ago. It worked by being blind. It's name was Blind Read/Blind Write. The copy protection couldn't stop it because it just copied the data one bit at a time. So it was blind to the protection. He says this script will write over the boot sector and stage 2, but can't be sure that will solve the problem. As soon as I get another drive to test I'll see if it works. I'll post back the results in case anyone else is following this thread and wants to know the answer too. Thanx for responding. Later... cosbear

[SheeEttin]

Re: Is there anything different about grub in Kubuntu feisty

A command like that was what I was about to recommend. It should solve it for the reasons you (or he) stated, it just writes.
You may be interested in what it's actually doing. If so, read the dd man page ("man dd").