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<div class="moz-cite-prefix">On 25/09/2013 16:18, Bill Cairns wrote:<br>
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<div>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.<br>
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<div>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.<br>
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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.<br>
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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. <br>
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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.<br>
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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.<br>
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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.<br>
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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 " <br>
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no such device d42bef6d ....<br>
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grub-rescue><br>
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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.<br>
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I am tearing my hair. How can a new installation not be
able to find Grub?<br>
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I am beginning to assume that I must have a hardware error.
Any suggestions?<br>
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Thanks,<br>
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Bill<br>
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Hi Bill, I fix all boot-probs with a too called boot-repair,<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Boot-Repair">https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Boot-Repair</a><br>
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Hope this helps you. Good luck.<br>
Miles<br>
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