Re: [SLUG] PC won't recognise boot disk - SOLVED
I'd spent enough time pissing around with it. So I went and bought a cheap new pc. Thanks everyone. Kind Regards Kyle -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] PC won't recognise boot disk
On 09/06/11 12:05, K L wrote: I have thrice now wiped the entire disk and re-installed, including physically zero-ing out the first 512 bytes (which I understand to be the MBR) so I would've expected the re-installs to deal with that. If you're 100% sure the BIOS is set to boot off the correct disk once it's been wiped and reinstalled (you don't have a USB flash drive or MP3 player plugged in, do you?), then it's possible a virus protection setting on the BIOS is blocking overwriting the MBR. Some BIOSes have a virus protection feature (*cough*) which basically blocks any attempts to write to the MBR. Or, in practice, I would imagine that it silently ignores attempts. -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] PC won't recognise boot disk
Hi Kyle, You know, it might be that you have a problem with primary and secondary disks. IDE disks have a primary and secondary setup. This is the jumpers on the back of the disk next to the IDE connector. There is also a 1st IDE and 2ndIDE connector on the MB. I suggest that you remove all the disks and CDs. Then locate the 1st IDE cable. Make sure that pin 1 on the cable (usually has a coloured stripe on the cable) is plugged into pin 1 on the MB. Reseat it if you have to. Then connect this to the hard disk. From memory pin 1 on the IDE disk is closest to the power pins. Set the jumper to MASTER on the disk. Boot and go into the BIOS and check that it sees the disk and nothing else. Partition the disk and make sure that the first partition is active. I'd make one partition for the whole disk for an initial test. Then format and install something. Power off and on, and I don't mean soft reboot, Power down. Then on again and see if it boots to the HDD. If ok here then add one device at a time. If on the same cable as the HDD then make sure that the second device on the cable is set to SLAVE. See how you go. Thanks, Ben Donohue On 8/06/2011 9:54 PM, Kyle wrote: 2 or 3 yr old pc running SiS-661 chipset, celeron and 1GB. So your average every day bog standard pc with an 80GB IDE HDD. Ubuntu 10.10 runs fine from live CD, albeit a bit slow. Even installs fine, albeit slow. Used to dual-boot XP / Ubuntu till me dear sweet mother asked me to add in an old disk of hers formatted in FAT32. Suddenly, it popped up with; Boot disk priority has changed. Please enter setup to check bla blah blah. Never booted since. FAT32 disk since removed. Original disk wiped, partition table wiped, reinstalled Ubuntu only. MBR zeroed out and full OS re-install. And the bloody thing STILL won't find the OS on boot. Does POST, finds HDD + 2 CD's, tries to boot from CD, then comes; DISK BOOT FAILURE, INSERT SYSTEM DISK AND PRESS ENTER Boot from live cd again; run fdisk, far as fdisk concerned all partitions there with sda1 marked as boot. MEMTest all good. Everything seems right. Only peculiarity I can see is despite wiping partition table and writing empty table to re-boot again from disc, is when creating partitions it gives me sda1, sda5 (swap) and sda6 (/). What happened to sda's 2, 3 4? BIOS shows this disc as first in HDD boot order after CD's. Can anyone offer any suggestions as to why this thing simply refuses to locate the boot partition please? -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
[SLUG] PC won't recognise boot disk
2 or 3 yr old pc running SiS-661 chipset, celeron and 1GB. So your average every day bog standard pc with an 80GB IDE HDD. Ubuntu 10.10 runs fine from live CD, albeit a bit slow. Even installs fine, albeit slow. Used to dual-boot XP / Ubuntu till me dear sweet mother asked me to add in an old disk of hers formatted in FAT32. Suddenly, it popped up with; Boot disk priority has changed. Please enter setup to check bla blah blah. Never booted since. FAT32 disk since removed. Original disk wiped, partition table wiped, reinstalled Ubuntu only. MBR zeroed out and full OS re-install. And the bloody thing STILL won't find the OS on boot. Does POST, finds HDD + 2 CD's, tries to boot from CD, then comes; DISK BOOT FAILURE, INSERT SYSTEM DISK AND PRESS ENTER Boot from live cd again; run fdisk, far as fdisk concerned all partitions there with sda1 marked as boot. MEMTest all good. Everything seems right. Only peculiarity I can see is despite wiping partition table and writing empty table to re-boot again from disc, is when creating partitions it gives me sda1, sda5 (swap) and sda6 (/). What happened to sda's 2, 3 4? BIOS shows this disc as first in HDD boot order after CD's. Can anyone offer any suggestions as to why this thing simply refuses to locate the boot partition please? -- Kind Regards Kyle -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] PC won't recognise boot disk
Hi Kyle, The primary or boot partition is not set to active. Use a tool like a boot disk or anything that can set the boot partition to active partition. Thanks, Ben Donohue On 8/06/2011 9:54 PM, Kyle wrote: 2 or 3 yr old pc running SiS-661 chipset, celeron and 1GB. So your average every day bog standard pc with an 80GB IDE HDD. Ubuntu 10.10 runs fine from live CD, albeit a bit slow. Even installs fine, albeit slow. Used to dual-boot XP / Ubuntu till me dear sweet mother asked me to add in an old disk of hers formatted in FAT32. Suddenly, it popped up with; Boot disk priority has changed. Please enter setup to check bla blah blah. Never booted since. FAT32 disk since removed. Original disk wiped, partition table wiped, reinstalled Ubuntu only. MBR zeroed out and full OS re-install. And the bloody thing STILL won't find the OS on boot. Does POST, finds HDD + 2 CD's, tries to boot from CD, then comes; DISK BOOT FAILURE, INSERT SYSTEM DISK AND PRESS ENTER Boot from live cd again; run fdisk, far as fdisk concerned all partitions there with sda1 marked as boot. MEMTest all good. Everything seems right. Only peculiarity I can see is despite wiping partition table and writing empty table to re-boot again from disc, is when creating partitions it gives me sda1, sda5 (swap) and sda6 (/). What happened to sda's 2, 3 4? BIOS shows this disc as first in HDD boot order after CD's. Can anyone offer any suggestions as to why this thing simply refuses to locate the boot partition please? -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] PC won't recognise boot disk
Hi again Kyle, partitions on x86 hardware go like the following... partition1 = primary = sda1 partition2 = primary = sda2 partition3 = primary = sda3 partition4 = primary = sda4 partition5 = extended = sda5 (living inside of one of the primary partitions) partition6 = extended = sda6 (living inside of one of the primary partitions) etc. So you have a sda1 and possibly a sda4 with nothing else in it except sda5 and sda6. So you only see sda1 (primary) and sda5 and sda5 as (extended) partitions. Thanks, Ben Donohue On 8/06/2011 9:54 PM, Kyle wrote: 2 or 3 yr old pc running SiS-661 chipset, celeron and 1GB. So your average every day bog standard pc with an 80GB IDE HDD. Ubuntu 10.10 runs fine from live CD, albeit a bit slow. Even installs fine, albeit slow. Used to dual-boot XP / Ubuntu till me dear sweet mother asked me to add in an old disk of hers formatted in FAT32. Suddenly, it popped up with; Boot disk priority has changed. Please enter setup to check bla blah blah. Never booted since. FAT32 disk since removed. Original disk wiped, partition table wiped, reinstalled Ubuntu only. MBR zeroed out and full OS re-install. And the bloody thing STILL won't find the OS on boot. Does POST, finds HDD + 2 CD's, tries to boot from CD, then comes; DISK BOOT FAILURE, INSERT SYSTEM DISK AND PRESS ENTER Boot from live cd again; run fdisk, far as fdisk concerned all partitions there with sda1 marked as boot. MEMTest all good. Everything seems right. Only peculiarity I can see is despite wiping partition table and writing empty table to re-boot again from disc, is when creating partitions it gives me sda1, sda5 (swap) and sda6 (/). What happened to sda's 2, 3 4? BIOS shows this disc as first in HDD boot order after CD's. Can anyone offer any suggestions as to why this thing simply refuses to locate the boot partition please? -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] PC won't recognise boot disk
Ben, thanks the info, but that's apparently not it. Or so it would seem. According to both fdisk and GParted from the liveCD, the boot flag is set on sda1 (/boot). P.S. Thanks for the lesson on partition numbering. Kind Regards Kyle On 08/06/11 10:04 PM, Ben Donohue wrote: Hi Kyle, The primary or boot partition is not set to active. Use a tool like a boot disk or anything that can set the boot partition to active partition. Thanks, Ben Donohue On 8/06/2011 9:54 PM, Kyle wrote: 2 or 3 yr old pc running SiS-661 chipset, celeron and 1GB. So your average every day bog standard pc with an 80GB IDE HDD. Ubuntu 10.10 runs fine from live CD, albeit a bit slow. Even installs fine, albeit slow. Used to dual-boot XP / Ubuntu till me dear sweet mother asked me to add in an old disk of hers formatted in FAT32. Suddenly, it popped up with; Boot disk priority has changed. Please enter setup to check bla blah blah. Never booted since. FAT32 disk since removed. Original disk wiped, partition table wiped, reinstalled Ubuntu only. MBR zeroed out and full OS re-install. And the bloody thing STILL won't find the OS on boot. Does POST, finds HDD + 2 CD's, tries to boot from CD, then comes; DISK BOOT FAILURE, INSERT SYSTEM DISK AND PRESS ENTER Boot from live cd again; run fdisk, far as fdisk concerned all partitions there with sda1 marked as boot. MEMTest all good. Everything seems right. Only peculiarity I can see is despite wiping partition table and writing empty table to re-boot again from disc, is when creating partitions it gives me sda1, sda5 (swap) and sda6 (/). What happened to sda's 2, 3 4? BIOS shows this disc as first in HDD boot order after CD's. Can anyone offer any suggestions as to why this thing simply refuses to locate the boot partition please? -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] PC won't recognise boot disk
Kyle == Kyle k...@attitia.com writes: Kyle Ben, thanks the info, but that's apparently not it. Or so it Kyle would seem. According to both fdisk and GParted from the Kyle liveCD, the boot flag is set on sda1 (/boot). Sounds like the MBR is corrupt. From your live CD use the install-mbr program to reinstate it. You'll *probably* need to say, install-mbr /dev/sda if there's only one hard disc present. Peter C -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] PC won't recognise boot disk
On 06/08/2011 09:54 PM, Kyle wrote: 2 or 3 yr old pc running SiS-661 chipset, celeron and 1GB. So your average every day bog standard pc with an 80GB IDE HDD. Ubuntu 10.10 runs fine from live CD, albeit a bit slow. Even installs fine, albeit slow. Used to dual-boot XP / Ubuntu till me dear sweet mother asked me to add in an old disk of hers formatted in FAT32. Suddenly, it popped up with; Boot disk priority has changed. Please enter setup to check bla blah blah. Never booted since. FAT32 disk since removed. Original disk wiped, partition table wiped, reinstalled Ubuntu only. MBR zeroed out and full OS re-install. And the bloody thing STILL won't find the OS on boot. Does POST, finds HDD + 2 CD's, tries to boot from CD, then comes; DISK BOOT FAILURE, INSERT SYSTEM DISK AND PRESS ENTER Boot from live cd again; run fdisk, far as fdisk concerned all partitions there with sda1 marked as boot. MEMTest all good. Everything seems right. Only peculiarity I can see is despite wiping partition table and writing empty table to re-boot again from disc, is when creating partitions it gives me sda1, sda5 (swap) and sda6 (/). What happened to sda's 2, 3 4? BIOS shows this disc as first in HDD boot order after CD's. Can anyone offer any suggestions as to why this thing simply refuses to locate the boot partition please? best method i've found to restore a disk that's acting funny if you don't care what's on it dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda bs=10M count=1 just write zeros to the first 10mb of the disk and start again ;- -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] PC won't recognise boot disk
I have thrice now wiped the entire disk and re-installed, including physically zero-ing out the first 512 bytes (which I understand to be the MBR) so I would've expected the re-installs to deal with that. But happy to give this a go tonight when I get home. - Original Message - From: pe...@chubb.wattle.id.au To: Kyle k...@attitia.com Cc: slug@slug.org.au Sent: Thursday, 9 June, 2011 9:22:44 Subject: Re: [SLUG] PC won't recognise boot disk Sounds like the MBR is corrupt. From your live CD use the install-mbr program to reinstate it. You'll *probably* need to say, install-mbr /dev/sda if there's only one hard disc present. Peter C -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] PC won't recognise boot disk
Just thinking about it. I thought IDE HDD's were always recognised as /dev/hdx. But liveCD (in fact any boot program I use) is recognising this one as /dev/sda. What's going on there? I'll give that go too Jake, ta. Too late to save setup and settings. - Original Message - From: Jake Anderson ya...@vapourforge.com To: slug@slug.org.au Sent: Thursday, 9 June, 2011 10:58:35 Subject: Re: [SLUG] PC won't recognise boot disk best method i've found to restore a disk that's acting funny if you don't care what's on it dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda bs=10M count=1 just write zeros to the first 10mb of the disk and start again ;- -- -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] PC won't recognise boot disk
K == K L k...@attitia.com writes: K I have thrice now wiped the entire disk and re-installed, including K physically zero-ing out the first 512 bytes (which I understand to K be the MBR) so I would've expected the re-installs to deal with K that. But happy to give this a go tonight when I get home. Oh, if you're doing a reinstall, that's (slightly) different. In that case, check that the disk is visible in the BIOS --- especially if you've fiddled around with the hardware. sometimes the BIOS needs to be re-told that it should be looked at to boot from. K - Original Message - From: pe...@chubb.wattle.id.au To: K Kyle k...@attitia.com Cc: slug@slug.org.au Sent: Thursday, 9 K June, 2011 9:22:44 Subject: Re: [SLUG] PC won't recognise boot disk K Sounds like the MBR is corrupt. From your live CD use the K install-mbr program to reinstate it. K You'll *probably* need to say, install-mbr /dev/sda if there's only K one hard disc present. K Peter C -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - K http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: K http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] PC won't recognise boot disk
peter == peter pe...@chubb.wattle.id.au writes: K == K L k...@attitia.com writes: K I have thrice now wiped the entire disk and re-installed, including K physically zero-ing out the first 512 bytes (which I understand to K be the MBR) so I would've expected the re-installs to deal with K that. But happy to give this a go tonight when I get home. peter Oh, if you're doing a reinstall, that's (slightly) different. peter In that case, check that the disk is visible in the BIOS --- peter especially if you've fiddled around with the hardware. peter sometimes the BIOS needs to be re-told that it should be looked peter at to boot from. (I see you've already done this. Grrr. I really should reread the entire thread before replying). The only think I can think is that when you're reinstalling Ubuntu itfor some reason thinks there's already a boot sector at the start of the disk and so isn't installing a new one. Peter C K - Original Message - From: pe...@chubb.wattle.id.au To: K Kyle k...@attitia.com Cc: slug@slug.org.au Sent: Thursday, 9 K June, 2011 9:22:44 Subject: Re: [SLUG] PC won't recognise boot disk K Sounds like the MBR is corrupt. From your live CD use the K install-mbr program to reinstate it. K You'll *probably* need to say, install-mbr /dev/sda if there's only K one hard disc present. K Peter C -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - K http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: K http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html peter -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - peter http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: peter http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] PC won't recognise boot disk
On 09/06/11 12:12, K L wrote: Just thinking about it. I thought IDE HDD's were always recognised as /dev/hdx. But liveCD (in fact any boot program I use) is recognising this one as /dev/sda. What's going on there? This changed some time back (I can't recall the specifics, but it was in a 2.6.something kernel). All HDDs are now recognied as /dev/sdx, irregardless of their connection type. Cheers, -- Steve Wrong is endian little that knows everyone but. - Sam Hocevar -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
