Hello.

Im trying to reinstall ubuntu on a Maxtor Diamondmax 10 sata disk on a asus a8n-sli premium using the nvidia sata controller. Install runs nicely untill i get to the grub part. Somehow it wont install grub to the mbr.

When i chroot my /target partition and try it manually with grub-install /dev/sda it keeps saying 'The file /boot/grub/stage1 not read correctly'

I tryed disabling my pata disk in the bios but no luck. Still the same error.

So is there some grub guru who can help me with this one cause i seem to be lost. And my knowledge of the grub shell is not a lot.

Some details:

I dont have a /boot partition
my root partition is /dev/sda6
motherboard is an Asus a8n-sli premium
sata disk Maxtor Diamondmax 10
pata disk (disabled) Maxtor Diamondmax 10
my /etc/fstab file seems fine.

Please help. I really miss my primairy operating system at the moment.
I could try lilo or try reinstalling ubuntu on my pata disk but I really want it to work like this. (This is the setup i usually use and i like standards)
Grub worked fine on my pata disk.

Thanks in advance.

edit: This is what happends when trying it with the grub shell:

$ root (hd0,5)
Filesystem type unknown, partition type 0xe

So no wonder it cant find the stage1 file. But the partition seems fine.

edit2: did some googling on the grub shell error message above. According to some bug threads involving a not bootable winxp partition it should be fixed by changing the harddisk to LBA mode. My bios doesnt know LBA but does have a LARGE mode. But enabling that i cant even boot my winxp mbr record that luckily still survived all my attempts to install grub.

I solved it by using sda1 as a /boot partition. I thought that linux not able to boot a kernel on a partition past the xxxx-th (dont remember how many it was) cylinder was a thing of the past. But maybe it was another oops somewhere.

Only thing i had to solve this time was that the ubuntu installer saw my bootable harddisk as hd1 instead of hd0. wich gave some problems with booting. Solved it by editing the device.map and installing grub manually.

Recent versions of both lilo and grub no longer suffer the 1024 cylinder problem - check your BIOS as well.
Sounds like you have the PATA disk set as the primary boot disk in the BIOS.

Well the pata disk is my primary master on the ide bus. But the boot disk is and was the sata disk. Wich is the shown as the boot disk in the bios overview at boot time.
Windows sees the pata disk as the first disk too for some reason. Could it be a bios related problem then?

So im still a bit puzzled. But now that i have it working i dont feel a lot like reproducing it. Thank you for explaining the 1024 cylinder problem is a thing of the past.

I'm not suggesting you mess with your working set-up.
BTDTGTS - not good.

From *long* experience, I always allocate a /boot first, so I never see the issue any more.
I'll play around with my test box and see if I can reproduce the problem you saw.

Hmm it seems my bios is involved in this problem. When i woke up this morning i couldnt boot again because hd0 en hd1 were the other way around.. Seems this was the problem from start since the error unknown partiotion type 0xe is a fat-like partition type.

Luckily this problem was easily solved. And hopefully the hd entry's will remain static now. Else i will have to open a topic in an hardware related forum..

Anyways thanks!