Hi

i have Ubunta V4 i think, quite an old one anyway.

I am trying to clone this machine, using ghost v12, i tried a normal copy and a sector by sector copy, but each time i get a "GRUB error 17" when i restore to an identical machine when i try to boot, it freezes at this.

how do i get round this, many thanks for any help

I'm by no means an expert at solving Grub problems. I did some googling and found some information that may help.

First of all, here is what error 17 means, from the Grub documentation.

So grub is not able to understand the file system for some reason. Ghost is a windoze program as far as I know; unless you have found a linux version. I wouldn't bet the bank it could read a linux file system properly. Did you copy this using Ghost under windoze?

Here is a thread I found with similar problems, and a way to find out what is going on. Have a look.

http://www.linuxforums.org/forum/sla...rror-17-a.html

If you are bent on cloning a linux system, I would look for linux tools to do so. Keep in mind you will have limited success unless the hardware is identical, or very close. Things like audio and video partitioning etc have to match up, other wise kernel modules will have to be changed after the cloning process. It might be faster to just install to a new system.

Without knowing the complete configuration, this is only a guess:

GRUB gets installed in the MBR with the location of the /boot directory (containing kernel, stage files, menu.lst) "hard-coded" into it. Thus, you would need to clone the entire disk--including the MBR---AND the device referencing must be the same. e.g. when GRUB looks for it's files in --eg--(hd0,3), that partition needs to be hd0,3 on the new machine as well as the old one.

thanks for your replies

Not getting very far though, been looking through forums etc and trying things with no success

i tried this from the live CD :

sudo grub
find /boot/grub/stage1
root (hd0,1)
setup (hd0)
quit

this got rid of the error 17 messeage but just get a prompt at rebot to install bootable media, disk not bootable.

in the GUI console the hard drive and partitions are listed as sda1,sda2.sda3 (only 1 h/d installed).

cannot understand why a ghost V12 sector by sector copy does not work, is there any Ghost swithes i am missing? (i have made sure virus monitoring is turned off in bios)

On your live cd, try mounting the partition that contains your Linux installation. Then, chroot to the root of that partition by typing "chroot /path/mounted" where path mounted is similar to /mnt/drive or /media/drive. Do not use /dev/hdxx. Now, do the following procedure:
where (hd0,1) is the result returned by find /boot/grub/stage1. Make sure it isn't the live cd!

Hope this helps!

thanks again for your reply

i tried this but get "file system not reconised" when i execute the menu.lst line

it is a ext3 partition.

it is a old version of ubuntu, would booting with the latest ubuntu live cd make a difference?

After you chroot, try doing the procedure I listed above, without the configfile line. Then reboot, and grub should work. If not, would you please post your menu.lst file and your /etc/fstab file? These would help a lot.

a big big thanks to tromboneman

its all working fine now. I didn't try your second idea. But as said, when i executed the menu.lst line got meesege saying file system not reconised. i thought it had failed, but restarted and its boots off the h/d with the ghost image restored so i have an exact clone now.

think it was the chroot command which did it but not sure

a big thanks again to you tromboneman