Grub not botting after new hard drive installed

[dale456654]

Hi,

I installed a new hard drive to my system. I use a program called R-Drive image to copy all my os to my new drive. It done a pretty good job too, its an exact copy. I deleted the old one. But obviously now I cant boot. I had a look at the menu.lst file i dont know what to change it to. heres my drive setup,

C:\ - Windows Vista - Ubuntu
D:\ - Documents - Swap File
E:\ - Games

any help is appreciated thanks

[yancek]

I had a look at the menu.lst file i dont know what to change it to

Then post it here and someone will likely be able to help you.

heres my drive setup,

C:\ - Windows Vista - Ubuntu
D:\ - Documents - Swap File
E:\ - Games

That's not very helpful. You say "drive setup", are you talking about (3) separate physical hard drives or just partitions on one or more hard drives?

If you have access to a Linux Live CD, load it and open a terminal and as root run the command "fdisk -l", "sudo fdisk -l" if you're using Ubuntu and post the output.

What are you using to boot, Grub?

[D-cat]

I think your imaging software copied the partitions but created its own generic MBR instead of copying that from the original disk. This would effectively erase grub.

I assume you're using a wubi.exe install?

I'm not knowledgable on how to re-install grub from this particular situation, but I'm fairly sure someone else might...

If you can't even boot Windows, then Yancek is right, you need to get a live distro to boot, preferably of Debian/Ubuntu descent, so you can at least see what's going on.

[dale456654]

I am talking about 3 seperate drives

C:\ - Windows Vista - Ubuntu

Means my first drive with Windows Vista on the first partition and Ubuntu on the second.

I can post the output of those commands when i boot into my live cd i will go do that now...

Yes, I am using grub to boot.

About the mbr, I reinstalled Grub using Super Grub CD. But I get an error message when I try to boot Ubuntu I will post that here too... once i have checked the message.

No I am not using Wubi, I am using a "real" installation.

I can boot Windows and boot grub, but the problem is I cant boot Ubuntu.

[dale456654]

The error message I get is,

"Error 22: No such partition

Press any key to continue..."

The output from fdisk -l is:

root@slax:~# fdisk -l

Disk /dev/hda: 80.0 GB, 80026361856 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 9729 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0xf67df67d

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/hda2 * 2 9729 78140160 5 Extended
/dev/hda5 2 7976 64059156 7 HPFS/NTFS
/dev/hda6 7978 9729 14072907 83 Linux

Disk /dev/sda: 40.0 GB, 40000000000 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 4863 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x7846d37c

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 * 1 2624 21077248 7 HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda2 2625 4376 14072939+ 5 Extended
/dev/sda5 2625 4376 14072908 83 Linux

Disk /dev/sdb: 80.0 GB, 80026361856 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 9729 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x71a0c2b2

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sdb1 1 9730 78148608 7 HPFS/NTFS

Disk /dev/sdc: 1037 MB, 1037041664 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 126 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x006e7613

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sdc1 * 1 127 1012704+ c W95 FAT32 (LBA)
Partition 1 has different physical/logical endings:
phys=(125, 254, 63) logical=(126, 20, 22)


Thanks for help...

[D-cat]

Okaaay, that changes things a bit, and I'm sure Grub is as confused as I am.

Your output shows four drives:
hda - 80 G - 1 pri (ex) part (2 virt @ hda 5 and 6)
sda - 40 G - 2 pri (1 ex) part (1 virt @ sda 5)
sdb - 80 G - 1 pri
sdc - 1 G - 1 pri

There are two linux partitions both located on extended partitions which means they can only be booted from a bootloader like grub located in a MBR (I know you already know this, I'm thinking out loud).

The question that remains for me is which linux partition has the boot image, /dev/hda6 or /dev/sda5 ?
Grub has to know the full path to the original /boot in order to function as before.

Also, which one is the new hard drive? I have a theory that I'll explain if it's relevant.

[dale456654]

I'm confused as to how you knew my drives from that output

The fourth drive is my USB flash drive which i was booting the live distro from.

The one I want it to boot from is on the same drive as Windows Vista.

I'm guessing i need to change the menu.lst, if you need to know what that file looks like i can post that too.

The new drive is the last one which is shown as E:\ in windows.

[D-cat]

Which drive is the computer currently booting Vista off of, the 40 gig or the 80, and which one is the new one (I'd assume the 80, hda, but I want to be sure)?

[dale456654]

Vista is booting off the 40GB, The new one is the 80GB i now have 2 80GB one IDE and one SATA. Im not sure as to what they refer to, like hda and hdc...

[yancek]

I'm still not really clear on your system setup. You have vista on the sda (40GB) drive and the Ubuntu you want to boot using Ubuntu Grub is on sda5? Same drive?

Look at your output in the post above (fdisk -l output). You have a Linux partition on hda6, what's that? Data? Another OS? The error 22 shows no partition so whatever you have in your /boot/grub/menu.lst file from Ubuntu isn't right. Post that file if you can.

Having an "hda" and "sda" drive can lead to some confusion. If you can log on as root and then enter grub at the command prompt to get the grub prompt (grub>) enter the following commands to get information on how grub sees your partitions:

geometry (hd0)
geometry (hd1)
geometry (hd2)
geometry (hd3)

Hit the enter key after entering each command an post the output.