Can't boot Ubuntu 7.04 install

[duragezic]

I wanted to play around with something like beryl or whatever other cool videos I've seen, so I got Ubuntu 7.04 and booted it. I then installed Ubuntu from the LiveCD desktop and restarted my computer, except I never got a boot manager screen like grub. My computer boots straight to XP, even though I have installed Ubuntu to another drive. My hard drives are like so:

(1st boot prority/System/C: ) : 500gb SATA, with an 85GB NTFS partition for XP, rest of space is unpartitioned for now, 'Healthy (System)'
(IDE0 Master) : 250gb PATA with a single NTFS 250gb Primary partition -- data drive only
(IDE0 Slave) : 80gb PATA with Ubuntu. I did the guided Ubuntu install, and it appears to have created a 3gb partition for swap and the rest of the space (71.5gb) partition for '/'. I believe both are ext3.

The 71.5gb partition with Ubuntu on it currently shows 'Healthy (Active)' in Disk Management in XP. I'm not sure what Active means though.

The 500gb SATA is my first SATA drive, and I think something is screwy with that. Computer Management shows IDE0 Master as Disk 0, IDE0 Slave as Disk 1, and the SATA drive as Disk 2. I use the Guided Install in Ubuntu, but it must have installed the boot loader somewhere wrong?

Has anyone run into this problem? As I said, I think it is something to do with the SATA drive. I want the SATA drive to be C/System/Boot/Disk 0, but PATA drives seem to take preference over it, and maybe Ubuntu installed grub to Disk 0, which does not have a boot partition (the boot/system partition should be the SATA drive, shown as Disk 2). So basically I can't boot the Ubuntu install, and I'm wondering if there is a fix, if I can do it without reinstalling Ubuntu? If not, what settings do I need to choose if I have to reinstall Ubuntu to get the boot loader installed to the correct place? I used the Guided Install, which has always worked in the past, but again I think something is weird with the SATA drive which should be disk 0/first hdd boot priority.

 

[duragezic]

bumpage

 

[Nothinman]

I would guess that it installed GRUB on whichever isn't first in your BIOS order (PATA vs SATA), do you remember what it called your disks when you installed it?

 

[duragezic]

The drives are recognized in Ubuntu as:

/dev/hdb1 -- 80gb PATA (IDE channel 0, slave)
/dev/sda1 -- 85gb XP/C:/System partition on the SATA drive (rest of that drive is unpartitioned ATM), connected to first connector on mobo (SATA1)
/dev/hda1 -- 250gb PATA (IDE channel 0, master)

The information in GParted shows hdb1 and sda1 to have the 'boot' flag.

I am in Ubuntu again, off of the LiveCD. I'm going to poke around and see if I can install grub by itself to a specified location, or I might just have to reinstall Ubuntu. I'm guessing that it needs to be installed to sda1. I hope it doesn't give me **** like XP & Vista setups did, where if I had a PATA drive plugged in, it required me to have the boot partition on the disk0 (PATA drive), yet if I unplugged them, it let me install it to the SATA drive (disk2). But with Ubuntu, I can't unplug my PATA drives, as one of them is the destination for the Ubuntu install.

 

[duragezic]

*** edit: Was able to get my XP installation back. So I'm back to where I was in the OP ***

I spent 1.5 hours trying to find a solution to install grub under the situation I am in. I seemed to find the solution below recommended a lot, so I did it.

sudo grub
grub> find /boot/grub/stage1
// the above line returned (hd1,0)
grub> root (hd1,0)
grub> setup (hd2) // it had said hd0, but since my SATA drive is seen as hd2 in Ubuntu, the MBR of hd2/sda is where I wanted grub to be installed
grub> quit

Then I restarted, only instead of booting to XP or showing the grub menu, I got
"GRUB GRUB GRUB....
GRUB GRUB...." constantly flooded across the screen!!

Originally, I figured I did it wrong, so would use fixmbr/fixboot from the recovery console (as I had to do in the past with linux/xp dual boots). But they didn't work, and I noticed my install was showing as D:\Windows, and fixboot wanted to write to F:. So I happened to find some thread where someone had the same problem, and they said it was due to the other PATA drives. So I disabled both PATA drives from the BIOS, booted to the recovery console again, and that time, it correctly showed my install as C:\windows. So I did

fixboot
// target partition is c:, do you want to? y/n ... Y
fixmbr
// success
bootcfg /rebuild
// was unsure if this last command was needed. Turns out, it wasn't, as I now have two entries for the NTLDR, one is the original entry, the second is simply called 'XP' due to running bootcfg when I probably didn't need to.

That got my XP install is back, thankfully. I was able to edit boot.ini to remove the duplicate XP entry, so I'm back to square one after 2.5 hours. 😀isgust; I guess it's kind of a PITA to have mixed PATA and SATA drives, as regardless of my BIOS settings, if PATA drives are present, they get ID #/priority over SATA drives.

 

[duragezic]

Anyone know how to do this without screwing it up like I did?

Granted I could reinstall Ubuntu, and ensure that it installs grub to the MBR of my SATA drive (hd2/sda), but that is what I thought I did with the above commands, and that surely didn't work.

I was thinking of just using VMware, but it seems that 3-d acceleration is experimental and it is tricky to get things like beryl working through vmware at this point.

Something like this sounds really cool. It sounds like he uses Ubuntu as a vmware host, with XP as a client, except with beryl integration so that one side of the cube actually runs XP!!