[SOLVED] Grub Loader and Booting Problems

[Kaistar]

Hi! My first call for help!

I installed Ubuntu 9.04 on my external, and the Grub Loader is installed on my internal laptop hard disk.

The problem is that now whenever I bring my laptop around, it fails to boot because of Error 21. I believe it can't load the grub Loader or something. Is there a way to fix this so that I can choose?

[jayd512]

Error 21 usually means that GRUB is looking to boot a drive that isn't there. Try booting with a LiveCD and open a terminal. Execute:

sudo fdisk -l

[Kaistar]

I'm a little bit lost here. Looking for a drive that does not exist...?

edit: I'm booting from Ubuntu now, can I do the fdisk through the terminal?

[jayd512]

Yep...
GRUB work like this. You have your internal and external drives, right? Windows gives them letters (C:/ ; D:/). Linux gives them names (sda1, sda2 , sdb1). If one of them has the wrong name, then GRUB will be looking for something that isn't there.

[jayd512]

oops... didn't see your edit there...

You should have the terminal open, and just type

sudo fdisk -l

Just post the output here.


*that's a small L... not a 1

[Kaistar]

Okay I've done that and am about to try and reboot now. Wish me luck!

edit: Hopefully I'll be back soon xD

[jayd512]

No need to reboot. That command doesn't really do anything. It just shows the different hard drives and partitions that are set-up in your machine. Here's what I mean:

[root@jason ~]# fdisk -l

Disk /dev/sda: 250.0 GB, 250059350016 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 30401 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x7294eac1

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sda1   *           1        5222    41945683+  83  Linux
/dev/sda2            5223       10444    41945715   83  Linux
/dev/sda3           10445       20887    83883397+   5  Extended
/dev/sda4           20888       24619    29977290   83  Linux
/dev/sda5           10445       15666    41945683+  83  Linux
/dev/sda6           15667       20887    41937651   83  Linux
[root@jason ~]#

Using that, we can look at what your GRUB boot list should look like...
but that's the next step

[Kaistar]

Forgive me for I have failed terribly!

It didn't work. Gah. Also, I am trying to set up "Dual-View" or "TwinView" as I think that's what it is called in ubuntu but I cannot seem to save to xconfig. An error pops out.

[Kaistar]

Using that, we can look at what your GRUB boot list should look like...
but that's the next step

Oops. I was too excited.

Disk /dev/sda: 250.0 GB, 250059350016 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 30401 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x00000080

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sda1   *           1        5099    40957686    7  HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda2            5100       30401   203238315    f  W95 Ext'd (LBA)
/dev/sda5            5100       30401   203234976    7  HPFS/NTFS
Note: sector size is 4096 (not 512)

Disk /dev/sdb: 159.8 GB, 159840301056 bytes
26 heads, 50 sectors/track, 30018 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 1300 * 4096 = 5324800 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x20202020

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sdb1               1       30019   156093788    b  W95 FAT32

Disk /dev/sdc: 1000.2 GB, 1000204886016 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 121601 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0xe8900690

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sdc1   *           1      108481   871366671    7  HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sdc2          108482      121601   105386400    5  Extended
/dev/sdc5          108482      120638    97651071   83  Linux
/dev/sdc6          120639      121601     7735266   82  Linux swap / Solaris

[jayd512]

Cool. Now that we have that, we need one other thing. The output of

sudo cat /boot/grub/menu.lst

When we get a look at that, it'll be a matter of setting it up to look for everything properly.