Ubuntu Installation Problem Might Be Hardware Related
 

This is my first experience with Ubuntu. First of all, let me say that i am installing Ubuntu on a machine whose hard drive crashed and I have replace the C drive with a new drive and I think my problem might because of the pin settings on the back of the hard drive and the fact that my system might not recognize it as the C drive.

What happens is this. After I have installed Ubuntu, the Ubuntu system says that the installation is complete and that I need to restart the computer in order to use the new installation. After I click the button to "Restart Now" the CD drive spits out the installation CD and the computer hangs.

After waiting several hours just to be sure, I manually power down and power up the computer.

A dos-like display goes by the screen (as it always had) showing what hardware I have on the system . Here is where I see the first thing that is wrong. It says:

Pri.Master Disk: 0 MB Mode 0

If I bring up the BIOS settigs it says that the Primary Master is [AUTO]

if I let the power up of my computer continue it says that there is a disk boot faulure.

What do you suggest I do?

I assume you are using PATA drives (the ones that have the wide data cables), not SATA. Such PATA drives can be master or slave. If you take out your hard drive, there should be three letters on the top side:
C (=cable select)
S (=slave)
M (=master)
If only one drive is connected to the data cable, move the jumper on the back to either the C or the M position. Connect the drive to the black connector that is at the end of the data cable.
If you have two drives on the same cable; either:
- make sure that both are jumpered for C(able select). The one that is connected to the black connector will function as master, the one that is connected to the grey connector will function as slave.
- use M for one drive, S for the other (do not use the same mode for both drives)
Anything else is going to get your motherboard confused to the point where it may be unable to see a drive at all.

Also, if there is more than one hard drive connector (IDE connector) on the motherboard, verify that this new hard drive is connected to the FIRST connector (usually labeled IDE-0, not IDE-1, in small print on the motherboard near the connector).

And, when in the BIOS, you should be able to toggle that [AUTO] setting to several other selections, and if the machine is not old as the hills, you should be able to see some sort of information while toggling the setting - one of which might actually be the make & model of the drive. I suggest repeating this procedure in the BIOS, for each of the indicated hard disks that can be connected. For example, if the motherboard can handle a total of 4 IDE hard disks, then it has 2 connectors on the board (Primary and Secondary IDE), each of which can run 2 hard disks (A master and a slave). There should be a BIOS selector for EACH of the 4 disks. Toggle each of them to see if you can determine what connector the drive is connected to. If it appears on a Secondary connector, the machine may not boot from it.

There should also me a section in the BIOS, or a menu that you can make appear when the machine first turns on, where you can select what device to boot from. Be sure that your hard disk is selected as the boot device (although you can have the machine set to try to boot from a CD before the hard disk, and it appears that functionality is working fine for you, since you say you can boot the Ubuntu CD no problem.)

If you absolutely cannot figure out where the hard disk is connected by looking at the BIOS or by visually looking at the motherboard, you can likely reboot the Ubuntu CD and figure it out from there, using the fdisk -l command from a terminal window.

Good luck.