Old laptop (Pent III, 866Mhz, 30Gb Hd, 80Gb Ext HD. Hardy 8.04 unbootable. Help!
 

Hi Folks.
I have been experimenting with 10.04, which has not been cooperative, tried 9.10 using LXF Disk which is now on the external USB HD. In doing so I inadvertently put the grub2 bootloader on sda where 8.04 resides. I reinstalled 9.10 this time putting the grub2 bootloader on the ext HD. This all looks OK but I need to boot this to find out for sure.

My problem is this: I cannot boot up 8.04 because the grub2 is, presumably, in the MBR. I have looked at a lot of posts in Ubuntu Forum but they all seem to be for Linux/Windows situations using Windows disks to rewrite the boot. Is there a simple way that I can do this? I do have my original LXF 8.04 installation disk which will have the grub files in it and could be used in live mode.

Once I have got 8.04 up and running (/home backed up on Pen Drive) but I do not want to losethe other stuff by reinstalling the whole of 8.04. My laptop BIOS does not have the facility for booting from a HD other than the internal HD which may complicate things for dual booting. Advice is desperately needed.

colintivy

This guide should solve your problem.
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=224351

Let us know of your results please.

I had a similar problem ,

I do not rember the command but here are the steps you can do that will for sure help you.

-DOwnload and burn a livecd (gparted, backtrack3,..)
-Boot on the livecd
-mount the internal disk to something like /dev/hda1
-chroot on this partition with someting like chroot /dev/hda1
-reinstall grub from this session with the appropriate command.

After rebbot everything should work fine

Regards

On something that old, You are stuck on the internal hard disk, as usb and so forth won't happen automagically.
It doesn't know about usb until it sees a driver, and has an os capable of handling it. Bios back in the day could not. Catch 22.

Rescue some system, by hitting E twice as grub loads. You're thrown into some primitive editor. If you have a kernel and filesystem to point it at, get booted, or boot off a cdrom. Then put kernels, and initrds in /boot. You might get to boot an external HD if the kernel and initrd are available on the internal hard disk. Something like

root (hd0,0) # specifying /dev/sda1 as where the boot files are to be found
label TryingToBeClever
kernel /somekernel root=/dev;/sdb1 # In /boot, specifying your external hd as the / filesystem
initrd /someinitrd # In /boot

fiddle those around to suit.

FYI re: Ultilex, "The Ultimate Linux Experience"

http://brizoma.wordpress.com/2010/07...10-7-released/

If you have the Hardy install CD see post #2.

KISS

Sag47 et al,

Well done! It proved so simple in the end, which is where the posts of 2006 were good.

Use original Live CD for 8.04 (which uses grub and not grub2), Boot up in Live mode, Select terminal from Applications > Accessories > Terminal.

Code.
sudo grub
grub> find /boot/grub/stage1
(hd0.0)
root (hd0,0)
setup (hd0)
quit
sudo reboot.

Hey BINGO! laptop booted up normally and we are in business again....marvellous!!!

Tx a bundle chaps.


colintivy :D :D