Hi!

I've a dual installation, ubuntu and XP and I've suddenly got a problem when I boot it gives the error "GRUB: Hard Disk Error", Tried to boot from Ubuntu live CD but I don't know how to correct grub from there. How can I correct the problem, maybe which live disk is better to correct such errors?

Consulted similar threads but couldn't find a solution for my problem as I'm booting from livecd and others were giving solution as if one can directly access the installation on hard disk, but whenever I try with ubuntu livecd it access live installation


Stefano

Did you have bot xp and Ubuntu installed and the ability to boot into either of them? If so, were any changes made to the computer hardware/software recently? Are you using Ubuntu 9.10 or an earlier version?

Use your Ubuntu CD, load it and open a terminal and run the command: sudo fdisk -l (lower case Letter L in the command) to get your partition information to post here.

A quick google on this error indicates it is often a BIOS problem and upgrading the BIOS may correct it? How old is the computer?

I followed the tutorial at Web Upd8, I used it last week it worked perfect. I used a LiveUSB of Karmic since I have no optical drive, This tutorial says it is for GRUB 2, so if you are using Ubuntu 9.10 you are good.


Here are the steps copied from the blog:

You need a live CD of Ubuntu Karmic (Lucid will work too - or any other Linux distribution which uses Grub2) from which you need to boot. Once you boot to the LIVE CD, open a terminal an and type these commands:

a) Firstly, you need to find out on which partition your Linux system is installed:

sudo fdisk -l

(in my case, it's "sda1")

b) Now, we must mount this partition:

sudo mount /dev/sda1 /mnt

Where "sda1" is the partition where you installed Ubuntu (or any other Linux distro). It could be "sda5", "sda6", etc. for you.

c) Install grub to the partition you've mounted:

sudo grub-install -–root-directory=/mnt/ /dev/sda



Important: Please notice that it's "/dev/sda", not "/dev/sda1". "sda" is the hard disk on which your Linux distribution is installed!

d) Restart your computer. As previous Grub2 entries are removed, run the following command to restore them:

sudo update-grub