Laptop install fail - Dell Inspiron 6000 (need GRUB-fu?)

Alan McKay alan.mckay at gmail.com
Sat Dec 5 20:13:20 UTC 2009


Hey folks,

Well, things did not go so well for my wife's laptop.

I booted the 9.10 CD and chose the install option without trying the
Live CD first.  It seemed to install fine but when I removed the CD
and rebooted, it just comes up and says there is and unknown device
and some big long HEX number.

So I boot the Live CD and get it to mount the HD, and sure enough it
mounts at /media/same-big-hex-number

Hmmm.  So I look on the disk at /etc/fstab and it is also using that
number, so i changed it over to the raw device /dev/sda1 for / and
/dev/sda5 for swap.

Now, one odd thing I did notice was that "sfdisk -l" lists the
partitions - and there were 2 used, then 2 blank, then sda5 which was
swap.  I thought that odd.  But even odder was that when I went into
fdisk and did "p" it showed no partitions!  WTF?

So I googled "ubuntu dell inspiron 6000" and not much came up.

No help here either : http://www.linux-laptop.net/dell.html

Oh, I also at boot time went into the GRUB edit mode and that number
was in there too - so clearly this is my remaining issue - but GRUB
seems to have advanced a lot since I was last really into it about 4
or 5 years ago.  I also went into /etc/grub.d from the live CD and saw
a whole bunch of greek in there instead of the old grub file I used to
be familiar with.

So - what is the magic incantation I need here?   I'm assuming some
GRUB-fu would fix me up?

thanks,
-Alan

-- 
“Don't eat anything you've ever seen advertised on TV”
         - Michael Pollan, author of "In Defense of Food"




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