Hi,

I have recently replaced the hard drive in a Dell-Inspiron 1520 after my old drive died. I bought a new higher capacity hard drive and decided to try and set up a Vista / Linux system.

I tried to re-install the original OS (Vista) using the Dell recovery disks and instructions. I then installed Ubuntu. The problem I have is that I can only boot into either OS if I have a bootable disc in the DVD drive.

If I use the Dell recovery disk the computer boots straight into Vista If I use the Ubuntu disk I get a number of choices including booting Ubuntu or Vista.

If I start the computer from the hard drive (without a bootable disk) I get the message "No Bootable Devices". I have tried the diagnostic software and the hardware passes all tests.

I have a feeling it is something to do with the way the Dell OEM recovery disk has partitioned the hard drive see below. df -h

/dev/sda6 106G 2.9G 98G 3% /
none 2.0G 280K 2.0G 1% /dev
none 2.0G 200K 2.0G 1% /dev/shm
none 2.0G 92K 2.0G 1% /var/run
none 2.0G 0 2.0G 0% /var/lock
/dev/sr0 4.1G 4.1G 0 100% /media/Ubuntu 10.10 i386
/dev/sda1 47M 124K 47M 1% /media/DellUtility
/dev/sda2 119G 11G 108G 9% /media/EA9872FA9872C51B
/dev/sda5 3.0G 730M 2.3G 24% /media/MEDIADIRECT

Any help or advice would be much appreciated.

More information is needed to get help and the best thing I am aware of is the bootinfoscript. Go to the link below, read the instructions, download and run the script and post the results.txt output file. It will give detailed information on your drives/partitions and boot files.

http://sourceforge.net/projects/bootinfoscript/


That would indicate you either have the CD set to first boot priority in the BIOS or you didn't install Ubuntu Grub bootloader to the mbr.

"No Bootable Devices" means that the hard drive you installed has not been loaded correctly for a boot loader.

Either reinstall grub or use vista to fix boot loader.

It may be that this system can't support such a large drive but usually that is a different complaint.

Thanks for the advice,

I managed to resolve the issue with a BIOS update. I replaced version A05 with A09 and my PC dual boots into Vista or Ubuntu from the GRUB menu.

I'm not sure how this fixed my probem, but I guess it's the start of the learning curve.

Once again thanks for your response.

Thanks for the reply.

I'd have never suggested that but good that it did work.