Finally installed! but no boot loader...

[Gary W. Swearingen]

"Dotan Cohen" <dotancohen at gmail.com> writes:

> After two hard days, I finally got kubuntu to install, but with no
> boot loader. This is the message I got during install:
> "You will need to boot manually with the /vmlinuz kernel on partition
> /dev/hda1 and root=/dev/hda1 passed as a kernel argument"
>
> When I booted up I got to a prompt that asked for a user name. I gave
> root and got a prompt with no password. What must I do now to get grub
> installed and to have a gui? Thanks for putting up with me!

Weird.  I don't even know what it means to "boot manually".  And your
subject says "no boot loader", while it's impossible to boot basic
OSes like kubuntu without a boot loader.  I wish you'd explained
better what you saw between starting the boot and getting the
user-name prompt.  It sounds like you got a normal Unix terminal
prompt.

The kubuntu install leaves "root" without ability to log in, so
you should have answered the prompt with the user info that you
should have entered during the install.

Back to the boot, I'll guess that you booted the install CD and
answered it's prompt with some magic I forget to boot your new OS off
hda1.  In any case, I guess you'd want to learn how to configure grub
(there's lots on the WWW) and try installing to the MBR, etc.  Look
into "update-grub" as this can make the process easier (it makes a
menu.lst file for kernels in /boot, at least).  Remember that one or
more of the commands you use will need to be proceeded by "sudo ",
unless you become the root user.  Finally, you'll probably need to
configure KDE's kdm to give you GUI logins.  I forget, but it's a
FAQ that Google or the (k)ubuntu wiki should help with.

I don't know why you didn't get a grub MBR during the install, nor
why it didn't give you an automatic boot to a GUI.