Hi,
I'm new here so I'm just trying to get an older version of ubuntu up.

I have run the install to the end, rebooted and came up with 'GRUB Loading, Please wait... Error 17.
I just followed the default settings; I hope I didn't miss anything.
This went onto a slave drive (which has XP) beside the master which has 98. It looks like all the partitioning went ok (to me, anyway) but when I rebooted it came up with that statement and hung.
Thanks. mmm. Maybe there's a better one to try out the Linux type system.

No, GRUB doesn't mind the layout. Re-insert the first ubuntu disk and try if they offer a repair mode (SuSE does, in particular for the boot loader).

Else search this site for exactly this error, it has been covered for n times (n>=100 ).

No, GRUB doesn't mind the layout. Re-insert the first ubuntu disk and try if they offer a repair mode (SuSE does, in particular for the boot loader).

Else search this site for exactly this error, it has been covered for n times (n>=100 ).

Thanks over here; I've gone where I should have in the first place.
Rebuilt ubuntu but now have 'geom' error; working on it.

Rebuilding == Re-installing?

That should not have been necessary, but since it is done now...

Please post your solution .

I ran into this problem, and while I am not 100% on what of the things I did was the actual fix, here is a list of things I had to do:

1)I re-installed ~3 times trying to get grub into the MBR correctly, which wasn't the correct solution and ultimately I ended up unplugging the HDD's I wasn't using to get Ubuntu to boot. The first master is a SATA drive with the slave on IDE, which may have had something to do with it. After I plugged my extra HDD's back in, I got the error message again.

2)Made sure the BIOS saw the drive with Ubuntu as the primary boot device.

3)Tried to run the grub install from the Ubuntu live cd, following some commands from my Linux Cookbook.

4)Finally I installed XP on the extra HDD in order to play games, which blew away the MBR, then I re-ran the grub installation from the live cd, made sure it booted Ubuntu and edited the menu.lst file to include the XP drive and now everything's good.

Hope some of this rambling may have helped. Like I said, not sure what actually fixed the problem but I'm pretty sure it was the MBR being hosed that caused it all as I was able to boot fine with only 1 HDD plugged in.