GRUB ?

[Rashkae]

Pastor JW wrote:
> On Thursday 28 August 2008 05:11:10 pm Rashkae wrote:
>> I'm sorry for the game of 20 questions... I'm just trying to get as
>> clear a picture as I can so as to avoid doing anything that can
>> potentially be harmful.
> 
> Not to worry, I was trying to explain the slowness in answers
> 
>> Now, I'll assume that the notebook has one hard drive, detected as
>> /dev/sda However, it's important you verify this.  type the mount
>> command, and note what drive/partition / is mounted from.  I'm guessing
>> /dev/sda2.  If, however, it's /dev/sdb2, then use /dev/sdb in the
>> following grub shell commands instead of /dev/sda
> 
> it is sda
> 
>> The first partition is the Windows NTFS
>>
>> The second partition is the Linux /
>>
>> And there's probably a third partition for Linux swap
>>
>> Enter the grub shell with sudo grub
> 
> I assume this is AFTER I boot the machine as like I said it will not let me do 
> anything unless I boot it using the grub menu from a pendrive.  The live CD 
> will not bring up the harddrive either and the pendrive is PClinuxOS 2007
> 

this is the part the confuses me.  From my understanding of your
messages, when you put your USB drive in there, Grub comes up and offers
you to boot the Ubuntu or Vista.  that is to say, you are actually
booting off the GRUB on the hard drive, and not from the usb, but grub
is only working when the USB drive is in place.

That would make sense if Grub was recently re-installed when it thought
the Hard drive was drive 1 instead of 0, and putting the usb stick in
made the bios assign the hard drive as 1, but that doesn't explain why
you are getting ERROR 17 when you run setup... perhaps partition
information has become corrupted....


and you say you can't even boot from a Live CD?? curiouser and curiouser.

In any case, from what I've read so far, Error 17 seems to happen if the
partition type of the linux drive gets muxed up, when you boot to linux,
use cfdisk or gparted, or whichever partition editor of your choice, and
make certain that the partition type is 83 (Linux)