Trying to Load Ubuntu 11.04 onto HP Laptop. Failed at reboot

[Tom H]

On Wed, Aug 24, 2011 at 6:37 AM, Peter Fitzpatrick
<Peter at fitzpatrick.net.au> wrote:
>
> There is a swap partition I believe it is Hd0,5. I ran Ubuntu from the CD
> (and USB) install disk and looked at the drive with gpart.
>
> The current version loaded is the 10.04 version and this one comes up with:
>
> Error: Out of disk
> Grub rescue> ls
> (hd0) (hd0,1)
> Grub rescue> set
> Prefix=(hd0,1)/boot/grub
> Root=hd0,1
> Grub rescue> insmod (hd0,1)/boot/grub/normal.mod
> Error: out of disk
> Grub rescue>
>
> Does 'out of disk' mean out of disk space?

AFAIK, "out of disk" is simply related to not finding a module (or modules).

The fact that the "ls" doesn't list the swap partition makes me think
that grub isn't installed properly and that no amount of messing
around at the "grub" prompt will result in a proper boot.

If I were you, I'd boot from the installation CD, download bootinfo from
http://sourceforge.net/projects/bootinfoscript/files/bootinfoscript/
run it, run a few grub-probes[1], re-install grub, re-run bootinfo and
the grub-probes, and post everything as well as "blkid -c /dev/null"
(the "/dev/null" is to skip the cache not to delete anything!) for us
to see if there's a difference - and of course, whether you can boot.

1. grub-probes:

mount "/" (you seem to have the plain install with "/" on sda1 and
swap on sda5) on /mnt, then

for target in fs fs_uuid device drive partmap abstraction
do
echo "## $target probe of /mnt ##"
/usr/sbin/grub-probe --target $target /mnt
echo "## $target probe of /dev/sda ##"
/usr/sbin/grub-probe --target $target --device /dev/sda
echo "## $target probe of /dev/sda1 ##"
/usr/sbin/grub-probe --target $target --device /dev/sda1
done