[ubuntu-za] Grub2 and other problems

[Bill Cairns]

I have being trying to get my 5 year old Mecer machine going again (it has
been sitting gathering dust for a few months). But I seem to go back two
steps for every one forward.

This machine used to run 10.04 with no problems. I had two hard disks  - a
160 GB drive (sdb) which I had partitioned sdb1 = root, sdb2 = swap and
sdb3 = home. Then a 500 GB drive (sda) that I used as backup storage.

I started off trying to install Ubuntu 12.10 because that is a disk that I
had easily available.  It ran beautifully in live mode.

The installation took forever - it seemed to get stuck downloading updates
to my existing packages. So I repeated the installation without connecting
to the Internet.

Again the installation seemed to go fine, but the machine booted to the
point of asking for my password - it then refused to accept my password and
would not go any further. OK so perhaps I mistyped my password or had a
senior moment or something, so I re-installed. Same thing.

Hm. So I repeated the installation except this time I told it to format
sdb1. Things went better and the machine accepted my password this time. In
fact everything looked good and I thought that I had a working Ubuntu
system. So I thought it was time to install all the updates that were
missing. That took a few hours.

But now I had a new problem. The Unity GUI kept on just vanishing - the
icons on the left and the tool bar on the top just vanished leaving me a
completely useless machine. Sure, I could get a terminal window by
CTl-ALT-T, but the terminal would not accept anything that I typed. I had
to push the power button to shut the machine down and when I started it up
again, the GUI vanished within seconds of my logging in.

I decided to cut my losses and start again. So I downloaded Xubuntu 13.04
and tried it in live mode. It worked perfectly - I was particularly
impressed that it found my wireless card and used it without problems
whereas previously I had had to compile the driver. I installed and the
installation went through. But on booting, I got the message "

no such device d42bef6d ....
grub-rescue>

This is the point at which I am still stuck. I have Googled this and
followed instructions to restore Grub, but get a variety of error messages
depending on the sequence that I follow. I have tried telling the installer
to forget the existing partitions on sdb and to use the whole drive - no
change. I still get the "no such device" message.

I am tearing my hair. How can a new installation not be able to find Grub?

I am beginning to assume that I must have a hardware error. Any suggestions?

Thanks,
  Bill
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