Fixing grub

[Kumar]

When I installed Kubuntu I already had a dual boot system with Win XP on hda1 and Xandros on hda2. I decided to give Kubuntu a try since I could not get Xandros to recognize my SATA drive. (I'm totally pissed about paying for that and not gettin any support. It's been 3 weeks and they still have not made more than the most basic response!) Anyway, I setup Kubuntu 5.10 on sda1 (that same SATA drive) and all (for the most part, except printing) is well.

I also have an older drive that I used under XP set up as an NTFS partition. I want to get rid of that drive so I formatted the Xandros partition as EXT2 (so I sould use it in both Linux and XP) and I copied everything over from hdb1 to hda2. Again all seems to be well.

Now the problem. When I shut down, unplug the drive, and restart, I get Error 21 when grub starts to load. I've done some forum searching and can't find anything to help this problem. I've tried booting from the CD and running rescue to try the grub-install /dev/hda trick but no luck.

I could do another total reinstall but I've spent days getting everything set to my tastes and want to avoid that if there is another fix.

Basically I think I jsut need to have grub redo the boot menu but I don't know how to do it.

BTW, the sytem boots up fine as long as the old drive is attached.

Thanks,
Kumar

[analyticalman]

Re: Fixing grub

Can't help with your particular setup but you can play around with your grub configuration by editing the /boot/grub/menu.lst file. (Make sure you take a copy first) the file itself has lots of commented examples of what you can put into it. It might be worth playing around with it

[Kumar]

Re: Fixing grub

Thanks for responding.

I actually did edit the menu.lst file since I could not think of anything else to do. I took out the reference to the Xandros disk and left everything else in tact.

It didn't help. It's not even getting to the menu list as far as I can tell. The error happens right after stage 1.5, whatever that means.

I also edited the device.map file and took out the reference to hdb. That didn't work either.

It seems to me there ought to be a simple utility for fixing this kind of thing, but I have no idea what it would be.

I guess I'll download one of the boot loader alternatives and see if they work any better.

Kumar

[Nirvana]

Re: Fixing grub

you could try reinstalling grub:

sudo apt-get remove grub --purge
sudo apt-get install grub

Note: apt-get has a reinstall command but I suggest not using it because in my experience it has not worked.

Also, if your ditching grub, try LiLo

[Kumar]

Re: Fixing grub

Thanks for the suggestion Nivana, but I didn't get to try it out. I ended up running throught the intall again. I found that I could go throught partition setup step without actually reformatting my partion (thankfully). It complained a lot but let me do it. I then skipped all the rest of the install steps down to installing GRUB or Lilo.

I tried installing Lilo but it kept saying it couldn't for one reason or another. I finally fell back to having it install GRUB again. It worked!!

I don't know why using grub-install in the rescue mode couldn't get the job done, but this method did. I was a little scary for a noob since I was afraid th whole time it would nuke my installation.

So for those who may be in the same spot, here's roughly what I did.

I rebooted from the install disk without the drive I wanted gone hooked up. I selected install at the promt and let it work its way through the process untill it got to partitioning.

I selected Manual Partitioning, chose my current Kubuntu installation (sd1) and in the options for it selected it as the root mount point and told it to leave the current files in tact.

After telling it to accept the changes and going through a "are you sure you want to do that" step or two, I was back out on the main install "step" screen.

I then jumped down to Install Grub. I chose to install GRUB on my hda device and it correctly identified my XP installation.

Next I just jumped down to exit the installation process. after reboot the GRUB menu came up and I successfully booted into Kubuntu! Yeah!

Kumar