Re: [Hampshire] Ubuntu install issue

Leo wrote:
> I've just tried installing Ubuntu 9.04 and am having some issues that
> I'm hoping someone can help me out with. I tried to do a clean install
> of 9.04 today onto a new disk that I'd already partitioned using (my
> still working) 8.10 install as follows:
> First 250MB to be used for /boot
> Next 20GB to be used for /
> Next ~200GB to be used for /home
> And final 5GB for swap
>
> When installing 9.04 I selected the manual partition setup and just told
> it to use the above partitions. Off it went and did its thing including
> detecting that I had XP on another disk. Everything went OK until I
> rebooted the system at the end of the install. Ubuntu 9.04 wouldn't boot
> and neither would Windows XP. If I select either HDD in the BIOS it just
> gets to a screen with a flashing cursor and goes no further. Any ideas
> how I can get XP and 9.04 working again?
>
> TIA
> Leo
>
> PS Also why was it writing to my XP disk? (At least I presume it was and
> that's why it's no longer working)
>
>

It depends on what sort of configuration you have your disks in, but it
needs to rewrite the MBR (master boot record) with details of Linux and
Windows.

One way to fix this is to boot from a dos disk and rewrite the MBR with
'fdisk /mbr' which should at least allow you to at least boot back into
Windows. If you don't have a floppy drive it is possible to create a USB
pendrive dos boot disk that will do the same thing (if your machine will
boot from USB drives that is). You could probably faff around with grub
to fix it, but to be honest it will probably take longer than
reinstalling once you know where it all went wrong.

Actually I've just seen Al's post and you may want to work through that
first and use the 'fdisk /mbr' option as a last resort.

I seem to recall Lisi once had a BIOS issue that meant the MBR was being
written to one disk, but the machine was booting off the other, which
happened to have an old master boot record written to it. It might be
worth digging in the BIOS to see how it is configured to boot your
machine and how that ties in with your disks.

Sean


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