Grub Error 21 PLEASE HELP!

tjl30 · 12-03-2006, 11:55 AM

At first I have 2 HD's:
drive 0: ST380020A (80GB)
drive 1: Maxtor 6B200P0 (203.93 GB)

I have a Compaq Presario 6027US, a regular some what old desktop. Windws XP Home Edition was on drive 0, and the Maxtor drive was a slave drive for storage. Both were windows partitions I think...

So I replaced the Maxtor drive with a Western Digital HD which I planed to install linux on. I used an Ubuntu Live CD v. 5.10. It set up Ubuntu on the second HD and added a swap partition on the first HD.

So normally my computer would boot into grub, then I could choose which OS I wanted to boot into. Well today I decided that I wanted to get some files from my Maxtor drive, so I put into my computer and got an grub error. So I put the Western Digital HD back in, and got a Error 21. I tried to see it I could erase my second HD by installing another Distro like Fedora, but the programs were not seeing the second HD.

Sorry for such a long message, but I really need to get my computer working again, any help would be great.

bigrigdriver · 12-03-2006, 01:53 PM

Quote:

Grub error 21 :
Selected disk does not exist
This error is returned if the device part of a device- or full
file name refers to a disk or BIOS device that is not present or
not recognized by the BIOS in the system.

You would get the grub error with the hard drive from the camera installed because it doesn't have Linux (and the grub files from /boot) on it.

Since you get the grub error going back to the Maxtor drive, which does have Linux installed, I suggest you check the cable connections. Loose or improperly seated cable ends would also cause that error.