I am at wits end! I have read a lot about this error and am now too tired and frazzled to continue, but here's the deal; I installed Vista on one hard drive, then ubuntu and Grub, (Grub I think on the Vista drive's MBR?) and all was working fine, then POOF! ERROR 17! Danger Will Robinson, ERROR 17!
So I do some reading because it is OK to lose the installs though I would prefer not to, and little seems to apply to my specific issue. Just so we are clear, I have a Biostar GF8100 MX+ SE motherboard with AMD Dual Core and GeForce 8800 GTS etc, etc, etc....I run four separate SATA drives in I think it's ACHI mode? Anyway, best thing I came up with was the "Super Grub CD". Trouble is the only thing I was able to do with the damn thing is finally get back into Vista by booting the partition direct (Vista is my area of expertise). Before I did this I had tried to use the Vista installation DVD to fix the startup, but no joy! With XP it's a simple matter, but when I try Vista's "new improved" automated way, it tells me it doesn't find any problem!!!
So my Vista partition is obviously the most important one, and I am not rebooting this hopefully till I have a solution. What I want to do though, if it's possible, is to restore Vista to boot off it's drive as if it was the only OS. Then, I want to install ubuntu as the primary boot drive, with grub on it. So if either system fails, theoretically the other will not. I have a pretty good idea of how to do this on two new installs, but what I would like to learn is how to fix my existing installs to be the way I describe. I am sure it's possible, but clueless as to how as I am a Linux/Grub novice. Thanks in advance!
So I do some reading because it is OK to lose the installs though I would prefer not to, and little seems to apply to my specific issue. Just so we are clear, I have a Biostar GF8100 MX+ SE motherboard with AMD Dual Core and GeForce 8800 GTS etc, etc, etc....I run four separate SATA drives in I think it's ACHI mode? Anyway, best thing I came up with was the "Super Grub CD". Trouble is the only thing I was able to do with the damn thing is finally get back into Vista by booting the partition direct (Vista is my area of expertise). Before I did this I had tried to use the Vista installation DVD to fix the startup, but no joy! With XP it's a simple matter, but when I try Vista's "new improved" automated way, it tells me it doesn't find any problem!!!
So my Vista partition is obviously the most important one, and I am not rebooting this hopefully till I have a solution. What I want to do though, if it's possible, is to restore Vista to boot off it's drive as if it was the only OS. Then, I want to install ubuntu as the primary boot drive, with grub on it. So if either system fails, theoretically the other will not. I have a pretty good idea of how to do this on two new installs, but what I would like to learn is how to fix my existing installs to be the way I describe. I am sure it's possible, but clueless as to how as I am a Linux/Grub novice. Thanks in advance!
