Grub Error 23 Wont Give Me Boot Options

[amreason]

First off i would like to say that i am really excited to be a part of this wonderful community. You are all really nice and extremely helpful. I'm so thankful for Linux.

On to my problem:

I just installed Kubuntu on to my exturnal hdd. I am using a laptop with an 8 gig hard drive and it is currently being used by Xp. I did not want to squeeze Kubuntu on to that. So i poped in the kununtu boot disk and installed it on to my external usb hdd. Everything installed like a charm. At the end it asked me if i wanted to install Grub Bootloader and i did. Instolation complete. It then prompted me to take out the disk, and restart. I did this. When my system started it threw up the sony logo for 3 secconds and then started Grub. Then Grub said error 23. And now im up a creek. I cant get anything to happen. Just a black screen with two lines of text.

Starting Grub.

Error 23_

I would very much like to fix this error so i can back up my XP files to a disk, buy a larger laptop hdd and put Linux on there the right way.

I am currently using my wonderful gnoppix live disk to post my sos on this forum, so when you suggest ideas for me it will take me some time because of the task of rebooting, trying your suggestion, then booting gnoppix to tell you what happened. Thank you for your patience.

amreason

[askrieger]

Re: Grub Error 23 Wont Give Me Boot Options

By running google/linux for "grub error 23", I learned that Error 23 is "error while parsing number", meaning that it found a symbol that wasn't a numbert when it was looking for a number. I suspect that you actually got error 22: "no such partition", because it was looking for /boot (with the linuix kernel) or /etc with the list of programs to run to start Linux or /sbin or /bin that have those prgrams. My guess is that without serious effort to reduce the footprint, you really need about 2GB on your hard drive to run Linux. You might get this by offloading most of your data from the C: drive on your HD on to a VFAT formatted partition on the removable, called d:\ Then, once you get Linux going, you could read the data from both operating systems.

Then again, it may be that windoze is now so bloated that it won't run in 6 GB. If so, I would guess your best bet would be to run Linux from Gnoppix or better yet, a Kubuntu live CD until you can get a bigger hard drive. Gnoppix runs the Gnome desktop environment, so does Ubuntu, Knoppix and Kubuntu run the K Desktop Environment (called KDE). Most windows users find KDE more intuitive than Gnome when they switch to linux. YMMV, though. If you like Gnome, your better off going to the Ubuntu forums where they talk Gnomish.