Hi Peter, > I want to remove my second hard disk (sdb) which has two partitions > used for data. The stuff I want I have moved over to free space on > sda. According to gparted, sda1 (XP) is the boot partition. sda5 is > the linux partition. > > When I disconnected the second disk, on boot I got the message 'No > Operating System' or something of that ilk. No Grub menu, nothing.
Sounds like sda has boot code in its MBR that found the primary partition with the bootable flag set, sda1, but when it loaded the first 512 byte sector of sda1 it didn't see the 0xaa55 signature at the end of it leading to a "Missing operating system" error embedded in the MBR. "sudo od -xN 512 /dev/sda1" would hexdump the first sector of sda1, letting you see if it does end in "aa55", not that it gets you on the road to fixing things, just confirm the issue. Cheers, Ralph. -- Next meeting: Bournemouth, Tuesday 2011-12-06 20:00 Meets, Mailing list, IRC, LinkedIn, ... http://dorset.lug.org.uk/ New thread on mailing list: mailto:[email protected] How to Report Bugs Effectively: http://goo.gl/4Xue
