GRUB ?

[Pastor JW]

On Thursday 28 August 2008 08:36:26 pm Rashkae wrote:
> Pastor JW wrote:
> >
> > 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.

Not quite, the USB pendrive immediately brings up a menu which gives the 
options in place three, windoze and in place four windoze1, clicking windoze1 
gives the boot options which used to be ones available with the harddrive in 
the first place, ...to either boot into vista or boot into Ubuntu.  Windoze 
option says it will boot to XP which has never been on the system, the top 
Linux option will boot to PClinuxOS, the second option down is to boot into 
failsafe PClinux PC.  However, now once you select windoze 1, you can now 
remove the usb pendrive and the machine will run and act normally until you 
turn it off.

> 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....

This is what I am trying to find out.  It has to be a file grub is supposed to 
be able to access which has been corrupted somewhere.  it has to be very 
early in the startup.  

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

Yes, you CAN boot a live CD, it just does not allow you to use the harddrive 
as the normal boot disk is all, your system is then a temporary one based in 
the CD and ram.

> 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)

Ubuntu was originally installed on his Vista system using wubi.  Surely the 
file system is whatever Vista uses. I am not familiar with either Vista or 
wubi.  I personally have NO windoze machines at all in either my house or the 
church offices.  I have no Macs either for that matter!  I have an Amiga 1000 
with four SCSI hardrives and running 3.9 Amiga OS, a Amiga 3000UX running 
Unix, six networked desktops each running various flavors of Linux, two Dell 
laptops running Ubuntu, and a Palm LifeDrive.


--
73 de N7PSV aka Pastor JW <n><   PDGA# 35276
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