I don't know if this is normal or not. Whenever I have added or removed hardware, GRUB won't load. This is frustrating when I want to add a hard drive to backup data from. Is there a way to get around this? I am running a dual-boot of WinXP and Ubuntu Hardy.

Welcome to LQ!!

If you add a hard drive to the IDE or SATA bus, the drive order as reported by the BIOS may be different. Thus you might need to change the boot order in the BIOS setup so that the drive with GRUB is on the list. Note that your GRUB config. settings will also be off.

If you are adding and removing internal drives, you'll probably need to change the boot order. If you are adding external USB, it should not be an issue.

I have winXP installed on an internal IDE drive. That same drive has GRUB loaded to the MBR. Ubuntu is on my external drive. GRUB returns error 17, which appears to be OS not found. Error 17 comes about when I add an SATA drive (I don't have any other IDE drive to try in there). My only IDE hard drive, which contains GRUB in its MBR, is always in the same position in the BIOS. Why should GRUB be caring about anything other than the two hard drives with the two operating systems on them? I never had this problem before using a boot loader. Would I be best off just going back to that route and choosing my boot via BIOS?

I have this same issue with the grub hangs on loading with an external USB/eSATA drive if I connect it by eSATA, and Fedora 9 on it. And just 1 internal IDE drive dual booting with XP and Open SUSE 11, which has the grub also there. What I do is to hit the F10 key early during the boot-up, and "select boot first device" shows, then arrow down to hard drives, then hit enter, then choose boot first drive comes up, so I arrow to select from internal to external hard drive and hit enter, which brings up my Fedora grub.

This is a little different. I only have one GRUB installation. GRUB seems to not like any kind of change. Is there an easy way to remove/overwrite GRUB with winXP's original MBR booter? I don't recall having this problem with lilo, but perhaps I did... it was so long ago.

Also you could try a supergrub live cd, which may help automatically map the drives and restore grub.

http://www.supergrubdisk.org/

If you have a genuine real XP CD to boot to, hit R, Recovery Console will start (in text mode), then type in this; fixmbr , and here is the article from Microsoft; http://support.microsoft.com/default...b;EN-US;314058 ,or this; http://support.microsoft.com/default...b;EN-US;307654

I didn't fix my original issue, but I did download SuperGrub and restored the Win boot. It's all peaches and cream now. I am trying to figure a way of getting Ubuntu back on there with a nicer boot, but that will take a little tinkering.

Thanks for your help.