LinuxQuestions.org - XP on internal drive wouldn't boot w/out Linux external one attached; now not at all

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XP on internal drive wouldn't boot w/out Linux external one attached; now not at all

A few days ago I downloaded and burned the Ubuntu 9.10 live disk. I wanted to install it onto a portable external drive attached to my desktop so as not to mess with others who use the internal drive for XP. When I installed it I made sure the internal drive wasn't touched, and only used the blank external one. I made the external drive bootable with the disk utility, restarted everything and Grub was very cooperative in letting me pick an OS. But when i tried to start the computer without the external drive (to get into XP) because i want the linux drive to be portable, Grub tried to boot, said "Error: no such disk" and wouldn't access the internal C: drive top start up Windows. I googled for help, installed lilo (maybe not properly) on the portable drive, and when that didn't work installed grub on the C: drive. Now when i turn on the computer i get Grub saying it has a GEOM error and that i need to replace a disk. This happens in every case i could think of besides booting from the live Ubuntu CD. Can anyone help? I have some family members very mad at me about this.

Also, the external drive doesn't boot linux up when attached to other computers.

It sounds like you managed to install grub on the internal drive. All is not lost. You can either spend a bunch of time learning all about grub somewhere, or you can do the following: Download a copy of Super Grub Disk and install it on a CD as an image. Boot the machine from that CD and select the automatic option. It should be able to fix grub for you. I'm not sure whether it will automatically put an entry in for you for XP, but I'm betting it will.

Won't work if the external is broken. Better to get the machine booting from the internal.
Boot your XP install CD and select recovery centre when it says to. Run fixmbr and reboot.

You can then use the liveCD to check out the external.

i don't think the external is broken, because i can still access all the files from another computer; it just isn't booting.
i've tried downloading a super grub disk .iso, but whenever i go near a site with the download my internet slows down to nothing. any ideas?

Quote:

Originally Posted by sidthesloth (Post 3863739)

What do you mean "near a site"? Here is a link to the download page on the official SGD site.

http://www.supergrubdisk.org/index.php?pid=5

This mirror from that page is, I believe, in the US. The other two are in Germany, so maybe that's the problem for you.
http://download.linux-live-cd.org/Su...ies/sgd/cdrom/

Added:
You probably want this file unless you either have Linux or want to download the bzip program first. It's only 3.9 MB which isn't a large file.

http://download.linux-live-cd.org/Su...isk_0.9677.iso

There's another question, though, are you sure that your BIOS is setup to boot from the internal drive? Did you change that when you were doing all the other stuff?

i got the download going fine, ran super grub and started a linux recovery something or other. i ran the fix errors option and updated the grub and now linux will boot up. i get a grub screen asking me to pick normal unubtu, a second ubuntu that's a backup or something, two memory check options, and windows XP. However, i can only choose the first ubuntu option, even though the others are recongized.

Added:

Quote:

i got the download going fine, ran super grub and started a linux recovery something or other. i ran the fix errors option and updated the grub and now linux will boot up.

Let me make sure. Are you saying that you can or cannot boot XP from grub?

Original:
OK, at least this is something. Bring up a terminal in Ubuntu and let us see the results of the following:

Code:

cat /boot/grub/menu.lst

sudo fdisk -l

ls /dev/[hs]d*

What this will do is show me what SGD setup for booting to XP and what Ubuntu can see of your disks. After this, we'll probably try mounting your XP disk with something like this, depending on what drive XP is on.

Code:

mount -o ro /dev/sda1 /mnt

i pasted the code into the terminal and i got
cat: /boot/grub/menu.lst: No such file or directory
in response
i take it this isn't supposed to happen?

i ran it anyway; what part of the code do you want?

it can see all of my disks and partitions. Windows is on /dev/sda1, like in your example code so i ran
sudo mount -o ro /dev/sda1 /mnt
and the terminal said "the device or resource is busy"

Quote:

Originally Posted by sidthesloth (Post 3863805)

Hmm. Please post the output of the other two commands as well as this:

Code:

ls /boot/grub

Maybe your grub uses a different name for menu.lst, perhaps grub.conf or something like that.

Code:

Disk /dev/sda: 80.0 GB, 80026361856 bytes

255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 9729 cylinders

Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

Disk identifier: 0x2f91c6c7



   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System

/dev/sda1   *           1        9729    78148161    7  HPFS/NTFS



Disk /dev/sdb: 320.1 GB, 320072933376 bytes

255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 38913 cylinders

Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

Disk identifier: 0x75810ffc



   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System

/dev/sdb1               1         129     1036161   82  Linux swap / Solaris

/dev/sdb2             130       38913   311532480    f  W95 Ext'd (LBA)

/dev/sdb5   *         130       19461   155284258+  83  Linux

/dev/sdb6           19462       38913   156248158+   7  HPFS/NTFS

is the output the second lines and

Code:

915resolution.mod  efiemu64.o     lspci.mod       reiserfs.mod

acpi.mod           efiemu.mod     lvm.mod         scsi.mod

affs.mod           elf.mod        mdraid.mod      search.mod

afs_be.mod         ext2.mod       memdisk.mod     serial.mod

afs.mod            extcmd.mod     memrw.mod       setjmp.mod

aout.mod           fat.mod        minicmd.mod     sfs.mod

ata.mod            font.mod       minix.mod       sh.mod

ata_pthru.mod      fs_file.mod    mmap.mod        sleep.mod

at_keyboard.mod    fshelp.mod     moddep.lst      tar.mod

befs_be.mod        fs.lst         msdospart.mod   terminfo.mod

befs.mod           fs_uuid.mod    multiboot.mod   test.mod

biosdisk.mod       gfxterm.mod    normal.mod      tga.mod

bitmap.mod         gptsync.mod    ntfscomp.mod    true.mod

blocklist.mod      grub.cfg       ntfs.mod        udf.mod

boot.img           grubenv        ohci.mod        ufs1.mod

boot.mod           gzio.mod       part_acorn.mod  ufs2.mod

bsd.mod            halt.mod       part_amiga.mod  uhci.mod

bufio.mod          handler.lst    part_apple.mod  unicode.pf2

cat.mod            handler.mod    part_gpt.mod    usb_keyboard.mod

cdboot.img         hdparm.mod     partmap.lst     usb.mod

chain.mod          hello.mod      part_msdos.mod  usbms.mod

cmp.mod            help.mod       part_sun.mod    usbtest.mod

command.lst        hexdump.mod    parttool.lst    vbeinfo.mod

configfile.mod     hfs.mod        parttool.mod    vbe.mod

core.img           hfsplus.mod    password.mod    vbetest.mod

cpio.mod           iso9660.mod    pci.mod         vga.mod

cpuid.mod          jfs.mod        play.mod        vga_text.mod

crc.mod            jpeg.mod       png.mod         video_fb.mod

datehook.mod       kernel.img     probe.mod       video.mod

date.mod           keystatus.mod  pxeboot.img     videotest.mod

datetime.mod       linux16.mod    pxecmd.mod      xfs.mod

device.map         linux.mod      pxe.mod         xnu.mod

diskboot.img       lnxboot.img    raid5rec.mod    xnu_uuid.mod

dm_nv.mod          loadenv.mod    raid6rec.mod    zfsinfo.mod

drivemap.mod       loopback.mod   raid.mod        zfs.mod

echo.mod           lsmmap.mod     read.mod

efiemu32.o         ls.mod         reboot.mod

is the output for the latter line
so there's a grub.cfg
i switched menu.lst for grub.cgf and here's the output:

Code:

#

# DO NOT EDIT THIS FILE

#

# It is automatically generated by /usr/sbin/grub-mkconfig using templates

# from /etc/grub.d and settings from /etc/default/grub

#



### BEGIN /etc/grub.d/00_header ###

if [ -s /boot/grub/grubenv ]; then

  have_grubenv=true

  load_env

fi

set default="0"

if [ ${prev_saved_entry} ]; then

  saved_entry=${prev_saved_entry}

  save_env saved_entry

  prev_saved_entry=

  save_env prev_saved_entry

fi

insmod ext2

set root=(hd1,5)

search --no-floppy --fs-uuid --set 5f786776-7b18-4cff-8355-1084fcf5f3df

if loadfont /usr/share/grub/unicode.pf2 ; then

  set gfxmode=640x480

  insmod gfxterm

  insmod vbe

  if terminal_output gfxterm ; then true ; else

    # For backward compatibility with versions of terminal.mod that don't

    # understand terminal_output

    terminal gfxterm

  fi

fi

if [ ${recordfail} = 1 ]; then

  set timeout=-1

else

  set timeout=10

fi

### END /etc/grub.d/00_header ###



### BEGIN /etc/grub.d/05_debian_theme ###

set menu_color_normal=white/black

set menu_color_highlight=black/white

### END /etc/grub.d/05_debian_theme ###



### BEGIN /etc/grub.d/10_linux ###

menuentry "Ubuntu, Linux 2.6.31-19-generic-pae" {

        recordfail=1

        if [ -n ${have_grubenv} ]; then save_env recordfail; fi

        set quiet=1

        insmod ext2

        set root=(hd1,5)

        search --no-floppy --fs-uuid --set 5f786776-7b18-4cff-8355-1084fcf5f3df

        linux        /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.31-19-generic-pae root=UUID=5f786776-7b18-4cff-8355-1084fcf5f3df ro   quiet splash

        initrd        /boot/initrd.img-2.6.31-19-generic-pae

}

menuentry "Ubuntu, Linux 2.6.31-19-generic-pae (recovery mode)" {

        recordfail=1

        if [ -n ${have_grubenv} ]; then save_env recordfail; fi

        insmod ext2

        set root=(hd1,5)

        search --no-floppy --fs-uuid --set 5f786776-7b18-4cff-8355-1084fcf5f3df

        linux        /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.31-19-generic-pae root=UUID=5f786776-7b18-4cff-8355-1084fcf5f3df ro single 

        initrd        /boot/initrd.img-2.6.31-19-generic-pae

}

### END /etc/grub.d/10_linux ###



### BEGIN /etc/grub.d/20_memtest86+ ###

menuentry "Memory test (memtest86+)" {

        linux16        /boot/memtest86+.bin

}

menuentry "Memory test (memtest86+, serial console 115200)" {

        linux16        /boot/memtest86+.bin console=ttyS0,115200n8

}

### END /etc/grub.d/20_memtest86+ ###



### BEGIN /etc/grub.d/30_os-prober ###

menuentry "Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition (on /dev/sda1)" {

        insmod ntfs

        set root=(hd0,1)

        search --no-floppy --fs-uuid --set ded8216ed82145dd

        drivemap -s (hd0) ${root}

        chainloader +1

}

### END /etc/grub.d/30_os-prober ###



### BEGIN /etc/grub.d/40_custom ###

# This file provides an easy way to add custom menu entries.  Simply type the

# menu entries you want to add after this comment.  Be careful not to change

# the 'exec tail' line above.

### END /etc/grub.d/40_custom ###

Wow, that's a lot of stuff in there compared to mine. So, let's see the contents of grub.cfg to see what SGD found. It should be a plain text file with configuration information in it.

Code:

cat /boot/grub/grub.cfg

Let's also see what Ubuntu has mounted, in case it's already mounted your XP filesystem for some reason:

Code:

df -h

Code:

Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on

/dev/sdb5             146G   27G  112G  20% /

udev                  1.5G  292K  1.5G   1% /dev

none                  1.5G  220K  1.5G   1% /dev/shm

none                  1.5G   92K  1.5G   1% /var/run

none                  1.5G     0  1.5G   0% /var/lock

none                  1.5G     0  1.5G   0% /lib/init/rw

/dev/sdb6             150G   70M  149G   1% /media/6A90529690526919

/dev/sda1              75G   58G   18G  78% /media/DED8216ED82145DD

there's the

Code:

df -h

output

Quote:

installed grub on the C: drive.

the above from your initial post, big mistake. You've overwritten some of your xp boot files. When you try to boot xp now, what error message, if any, do you get? To repair the xp mbr you need an xp installation cd/dvd with a recovery option (or you can just enter R at a prompt) and run fixmbr and/or fixboot from there. Before doing this, disconnect the external so you get the right drive this time. If you don't have an xp CD, you can borrow one or download. I'd do a search here for repair xp mbr as I've seen lots of posts here at LQ where people had to repair the xp mbr.