Need to recover from an ID-10-T error.

[UNGER, JOHN WM]

______________________________________
From: ubuntu-users-bounces at lists.ubuntu.com [ubuntu-users-bounces at lists.ubuntu.com] On Behalf Of Rashkae [ubuntu at tigershaunt.com]
Sent: Wednesday, December 23, 2009 3:49 PM
To: Ubuntu user technical support,      not for general discussions
Subject: Re: Need to recover from an ID-10-T error.

UNGER, JOHN WM wrote:
> Thanks, Steve.
>
> I tried the supergrubdisk - no joy. I may just have to tar all my files & reload Ubuntu 8.04.
>

Nonsense, but you should back up data files in case my directions go
astray somehow,, it's been a while since I've done this and I'm
paraphrasing from memory. (Translation: wait a few hours for kind souls
to point out what I get wrong)

I'm assuming your /boot and / are on the same hard drive, and this is
the hard drive your bios boots from.  Otherwise, it's just a bit more
complicated.

Disconnect any other HD that might be in your system.

You need to know what partition your /boot is in.  In most cases, the
grub partition number is 1 less than Linux partition number.  Ex: if
/boot is in /dev/sda1, that will be partition 0 for grub.

Boot from a boot cd with grub.  It can be your Ubuntu install cd, or
super grub disk, or system rescue disk, or Knoppix, whatever.

from a terminal, type grub to start the grub interactive shell (the
ability to install grub this way is what I really miss most from grub 2.)

Issue the following commands:

device (hd0) /dev/sda

root (hd0,0)

## Note: in this case, the second 0 is the partition number.  I'm also
assuming the hard drive is either the Primary Master IDE drive, or
connected to your mobo's first SATA connector, usually labelled SATA1

setup (hd0)

quit  ## or exit, of quit doesn't work

Reboot and you should be off to the races, if all that worked.


PS: is there a reason you want a dedicated /boot partition?  They
generally aren't needed anymore unless:

You want to boot and install grub on a HD other than the one with your
root filesystem, or your root filesystem is something really new and/or
exotic that is not supported by Grub.
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Rashkae,

I'll give your instructions a try. 

I did partition the HD to have a bootable Windows partition, followed the recommendations in the documentation for everything except I may have given more space to the Windows partition than strictly needed. The box is nothing fancy - a Gateway DX4200-09 with a 640Gb HD. I've got the memory maxed as well. I don't really need much fancy for what we do.

I was tinkering with the /boot (which is in / as you suppose) to try to resolve a message I was getting trying to do scheduled updates. I'll worry about that issue after I get this resolved. 

John U