Thread: Giving Linux a shot (Ubuntu I think.)

ilija, since you've got the install already you just need to find a rescue cd which has lilo (or some way to get it in). There shouldn't be any problem - after all it's just a bootloader. Not sure what Error 21 is, I'm sure you've looked it up though.
It's been many years since I last dealt with lilo so I probably can't help you more than you can help yourself but from what I remember it wasn't that hard, just annoying.

Surprised it didn't work, though.

If I were you i'd give another chance to grub, but write it to the linux partition and then use windows's bootloader to select there - read the earlier post in this thread.

Installing GRUB messed up the MBR. On bootup it would try to boot GRUB and end up freezing on me. The source of the issue is the "cute" controller that Dell uses. I never had that problem with my old school Frankenstein machine with a P4 1.4 that used a regular IDE controller.

So how do I specify for GRUB to be installed in /boot instead of the MBR? If I do it via apt-get or the package tool, where does it go automatically?

we need some more info of your partition layout and mount points, but here is something that may be useful.

my understanding of the booting process:
after whatever checks it does the BIOS executes the first byte of the MBR of the specified boot device (disk, cdrom, usb, etc.). If that fails the process goes back to the BIOS and it continues with the second boot device etc.
Now suppose your device is a disk with several partitions. The MBR can do many things. It certainly needs to have soem knowledge of the partitions on that disk and at least one type of filesystem on at least one partition. The simplest thing MBR can do is to find the booting code of the OS found on a filesystem and start executing it. A bit more complicated thing is to look at all possible partitions and find all filesystems it recognizes and all possible OS booting code that these filesystems can have (and the mbr can recognize) and then either start trying them in sequence, or present a menu to the user to choose one.
The MBR that microsoft ships, i think, is only aware of how to find and boot windows (I may be wrong). It may be a bit smarter than that and be able to hand over execution to MBR (or analogue of it) of a disk partition, even if it doesn't recognize the filesystem on that partition.
In this later case you can have ubuntu install a boot loader on the boot sector of that partition. That bootloader should be smarter than the microsoft one and know about ext3 or whatever filesystem you have chosen and be able to find out the location of the kernel/initrd.
GRUB is a very good bootloader and normally installing it in the MBR of the disk avoids some of the chaining I just described.
However note that before the boatloader is started the only thing available to you is disk partitions (i.e. if /boot is a on the partition hda1 the root of which is /, instead of a partition hda2 which is mounted at the location /boot you cannot install grub on /boot). I hope it's clear, but all i'm trying to say is that you have to install grub on a disk partition, not on location of the filesystem.
Generally you specify a partition to GRUB as (hdX,Y), where X and Y are numbers starting from 0, X is the device number Y is the partition number of that device. I don't remember if (hdX) and (hdX,0) is the same thing, namely the MBR.
I think install-grub or something like this can probe for possible boot devices.

So, suppose you've somehow managed to hand over the boot sequence to GRUB. It usually can start loading but then it may hang up. The problem is that there are two stages, the first is just starting the execution (easy to get to) and then GRUB starts looking around for the devices and filesystems, then there is a second part in which grub (hopefully) finds a menu.list file, reads it and proceeds to do whatever is there. Now I believe that when you install-grub you specify where it needs to look for menu.list, but if you're wrong i think you still get a GRUB shell where you can basically write your own grub commands (like in menu.list).

I am not a GRUB master and I don't remember what groot etc stanzas were (their arguments are also in the (hdX,Y) format), but it is very possible that after stage 1, grub may decide to scramble the X-labels (the Y ones are pretty safe). I've had this problem few months ago on one of our servers - there are several disks, most of them SCSI which are later used in software raid, and I couldn't really make grub to boot from one of these SCSI disk -ended up booting and running the OS from an IDE drive, which I was originally hoping to get rid of.

I know this may be more confusing, than helpful, but that's roughly my knowledge of grub. If you give us your HDD's layouts and how you plan to mount the partitions on linux, we may come up with a recipe of how to cajole GRUB to do what you want it to do.

Is this your only computer? it may be easier to help you over on some sort of a chat while you're trying to install grub.

cheers,

Ilija,

What's error 21? Can't find disk? Do you only have one disk?

In Fedora there's an advanced grub configuration option during install, and that's where I specify where I want to put grub (and not touch the MBR) - don't know about Ubuntu. After that you need to fiddle a bit - see below.

Never used it, but have heard super grub disk can be a useful for some grub problems.

There's also the gentoo wiki that is reasonably easy to follow (and appears reasonably generic). If you've only just installed Ubuntu, a reinstall using the info on this page might be the easiest fix, noting at the grub phase whether there are any options to control whether grub modifies the MBR or not (there should be...).

If the Ubuntu software updater (apt?) is anything like Fedora's yum, it'll install wherever the old software was.

Good luck mate.

James.

^yep what james said

ubuntu's install is a bit funky - you can always reinstall (it's only 15-20min) but you may be able to just do the grub part, w/o waiting through the whole process.
the funky part is that it loads stuff as it goes along, so you'll have to go beyond the stage where it detects the hardware and learns about the CD and the worse part is that sometimes if you skip a step one of the next ones may fail as the installer keeps track what you've done so far. it's only an installer check, though - i can usually do the said step from a console. f2/3 (may be alt+f2/3, or ctrl+alt+f2/3) gives you a console you can execute commands from. also after every task of the installer you can go to the list of steps the installer goes through and jump to some other place (just cancel the current step).

i don't remember the grub part of the ubuntu installer having an expert mode, but at some release the installer itself had an expert mode.

Definitely read the gentoo wiki, keep in mind that emerge just downloads and compiles the source and then installs it, so in your case this is already done by the package being already installed on your filesystem (the cdrom), or the disk.

it occurs to me that you still may be able to boot into your install from the cd - 'boot from a disk' or sth like that on the firts menu. once you're inside your ubuntu, the grub installer may be less confused about hdd's than when it's trying to do it from a CDrom during the install.

anyways, i've been quite successful in several cases when the grub install or another part of the process had failed (e.g. on really old hardware - p-II) but i can't really give you a recipe. my approach was to first figure out what the errors are caused by and then what would be a way to circumvent or skip the error-generating part.

ah, not sure if it's usefull but gentoo's grub had more features than the one that's compiled in debian/ubuntu - it was supporting more filesystems and had some other features that debian didn't turn on. shouldn't matter though as the stuff in the wiki seems the very basic.

good luck