Dual Boot (Ubuntu, Win 8) -- 2 Hard Drives, Nothing booting

[FitzGerald]

All,
Computer specs:
ASUS M4A78LT-M (AM3) Motherboard
AMD Athlon II X2 250
4 GB RAM
Radeon 6670 (DDR 3 version)

I have run into a problem that I've never had before. I have 1 (one) 500 GB Hard Drive with Ubuntu 12.04 LTS installed, and 1 (one) 500 GB Hard Drive with Windows 8.1 installed. Windows 8 was installed last summer, and so far I have had no problems booting either installation via Grub, for at least a year. Until today!

Unfortunately, my family was at home and discovered the problem, reporting to me "Ubuntu is not working". I thought it was merely Ubuntu, but have not been able to get either Ubuntu or Windows 8.1 to boot.

In Grub, if I attempt to boot into Ubuntu I get a black cursor.

In Windows, if I attempt to boot into Windows, I get a frozen Windows splash screen.

The way I initially set up both drives was to install Windows 8 on it's respective hard drive and Ubuntu on its respective hard drive. Right now I have disconnected the Ubuntu hard drive and am trying to troubleshoot Windows 8; but so far, no joy in booting. Even if I remove the USB devices (having them in seems to be problematic and freezes the Windows boot), I get the splash screen and then endless "dots moving in circle" splash screen. Sometimes it will say "preparing to repair" but it never progresses beyond the "circle of dots".

The other problem is that right now I can't even boot off of either a USB device or a LiveCD. I thought I had a working Knoppix Live CD (albeit circa 2009), or a Clonezilla Live USB, but Knoppix stalls after the splash screen and I haven't been able to get any of what I thought were bootable USBs to boot.

Since I have a spare internal 500 GB hard drive I would like to at least make a backup via Clonezilla and work on each OS hard drive separately, starting with Windows. I do have access to a work laptop.

I would think my MBR got corrupted, but that doesn't explain why my LiveCD doesn't seem to boot. At the moment I need to wait until my kids get to sleep to have the time to really dive into the problem. I will see if I can boot anything; if a live CD isn't able to boot than I'm going to re-seat my RAM.... and if that doesn't work than I suspect some motherboard problem (I'm not getting any beeps though).

I had Grub set up on the Linux Hard Drive and always thought there was one MBR on the Ubuntu drive and another MBR on the Windows hard drive. Its possible that Windows/Grub used the same MBR partition on the primary (Ubuntu) hard drive and if that got corrupted it would explain why neither is working.... but that is just my theory based on all the information

My goal tonight for troubleshooting will be to get a working LiveUSB that I can use and verify that I can see the Windows Hard Drive. If I can do that I will next move to backing up Windows Hard Drive with CloneZilla (just to be safe). The mid-Tower (CM Elite 343) case that I have is somewhat of a pain to swap hard drives in also.... *sigh* just what I wanted to spend my weekend on! I'll consider it a success if I can go back to getting Windows working by Sunday night.

 

[FitzGerald]

UPDATE 1:
So I spent most of last night suspecting a motherboard or RAM problem. I realized that the reason I wasn't able to boot off of USB was because my BIOS treats it as a hard drive, and USB devices show up under "Hard Disk" instead of "External Device" (duh!).

I was able to create a Puppy Linux Live USB, and I was able to start the boot process. At some point it would get to "Loading Kernal...." and then freeze up.

So I started to swap my 2x2GB of RAM DIMMs around different slots and one time I was able to get it to boot (with only one DIMM in). But when I replaced it with another DIMM I wasn't able to get it to boot; but then when I re-replaced it it would not boot again! So I swapped through all the combinations of RAM and I could only get it to boot the fluke time.

Than I noticed that the Puppy Linux boot menu has "Press F2" for options; one of the options is to start with pci=noacpi flag set. Setting this flag got me a successful boot! I realized my BIOS settings must have gotten messed up so I disabled both ACPI 2.0 and ACPI from the BIOS and now I'm able to boot up from LiveUSB without that setting.

Back to the Windows drive. It's getting past the splash screen with the "ring of white dots" but now everytime I get an error message about needed to repair, automatic repair failed. I can't boot into any of the options available to me. Unfortunately when I put what I think is the Windows Recovery Tool/Boot Disk (that I made from USB a year ago) it gives me a blank cursor too. Before I go any further I'm going to run CloneZilla just to be on the safe side.

 

[FitzGerald]

UPDATE 2:
Backed up my Windows Drive using CloneZilla.

So I'm completely unable to boot into Windows 8. Not able to boot into my original installation media, and unable to get past the Repair/Recovery errors I am seeing. Unfortunately I don't believe I made a Windows 8.1 Recovery USB after I upgraded to Windows 8.1, so I'm resigned to simply having to completely re-install Windows 8 all over and I guess that means I need to reinstall all the other applications that I had on it.

It did look like I had system restore points created for August 4th, but if I'm unable to access Windows, *period* what is the use?!

I'm wondering if I can create a system repair disk in Windows 7 that works on Windows 8....

 

[KillerBee]

just throwing this out there have you tried booting the Clonezilla image in Virtualbox on another machine

Haven't ever tried it myself but this guy did ...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ainjV3X6wqQ

then maybe you can create the system repair disk from within it

 

[FitzGerald]

KillerBee,
Thanks for the response; I never have really dabbled into the Virtualbox arena of computer-fu.

This afternoon I started going down a different path. So I initially was thinking "RAM or Motherboard" which is why I spent last night troubleshooting my RAM. There was no reason to suspect "video card" since I was still able to get output and see it via the BIOS. The fact that ACPI was disabled and allowed me to boot seemed like somewhat of a red herring, so I went in and re-enabled the BIOS settings I previously had disabled regarding ACPI.

So I'm at a state where I'm certain its not the RAM, and I don't think its quite at the point where I can re-install Windows 8 with confidence... one thing I didn't do was pull the video card out and see what happens.

After fiddling with the right BIOS settings (pro-tip: even if the internal graphics is turned on, you still need to enable it via a second setting in the BIOS)... I was able to get to the BIOS from the onboard video. I then booted off of another Linux USB (having used the Puppy Linux to create the Windows 8.1 installation CD). Success (this is with the ACPI turned on!). I'm getting somewhere!

I just booted into Windows using the *only* the internal graphics.... and then put the video card back in (but not enabled). Windows 8 is booting up this time, but running a scanning and repair (currently it is at 60% on my C:drive).

I'm trying to now figure out if it is the video card itself or the PCI-x slot on my motherboard.... and just realizing that the "scanning and repair" is still stalled at 60%. The "white rings of happiness" are still moving which is better than I've had the past couple of days.... and while editing this post I got back into my login screen.

I will now go and re-enable my Gigabyte DDR3 Radeon 6670 Video Card and see if I simply needed to remove some dust and re-seat it or it is indeed a failed piece of hardware (although first I will see if Windows even recognizes the PCI express bus).

[5 minutes later]
Windows did not report any problems with the PCI bus devices.

and.... upon boot-up magically Windows is back booting regularly without any problems.

So in short, my video card was either seated improperly or there was too much dust around the PCI slot-area. Fan-tastic! I guess tonight I should re-clone the hard drive in good/repaired working order.

I hope this thread is helpful to anyone in this forum or googling for a similar problem. Another thread on another forum led me to suspect some type of video card issue. Hope when I put everything back together (with Ubuntu disk) it will also work.

 

[KillerBee]

it's a good troubleshooting story - at least you didn't give up and reformat everything

now's a good time to make that repair disk

 

[FitzGerald]

Final update:

Today I got around to putting the Ubuntu disk back in. I connected that disk only, and it was able to boot into Ubuntu. When I tried to boot into Windows 8.1, I got an error: 0xc000000e, "PC Needs to be Repaired" (paraphrasing the error message).

I first went into the Automatic Repair, but it just looped again, and again, and again, and again.... for about 15 minutes. I used Google and then I found a solution, which I will post here:
- Use the Windows 8 Boot/Repair Disk
- Click through (but not install), you should see the "Repair" option
- Advanced Options
- Launch Command Prompt

Enter the following commands at the command prompt:
bootrec /scanos
bootrec /rebuildbcd
bootrec /fixmbr
bootrec /fixboot

Reboot computer after the final command finishes.

Unfortunately for me what this meant is that for the past 3 or so weeks, what I thought was my primary disk was actually my backup disk.... so make sure if you do a backup via clone like I did you aren't lazy and *DISCONNECT ONE OF YOUR DRIVES SO YOU ARE NOT CONFUSED WHERE YOUR WORK IS GOING*.