Operating system not found

[friwise]

Hi!!!!!
I have HP pavilion ze5375us laptop. 2,40 Ghz, 487MB, 40GB
It was given to me two weeks ago and I decided to make it run with ubuntu since with XP it was like dead. Now it runs with ubuntu 10.10.
The first two days ubuntu worked quite well but today when I opened it it says
"Operating system not found"
I tried and chenged the boot order but the result is the same.
What shall I do?
Thanks in advance!!!

friwise

[MASONTX]

Shut down and reboot. If the problem persists, pay close attention on boot and see if you are seeing any grub errors. 10.10 uses grub 2, and you may need to re-install grub from your installation disk.
Back up your data, and if you want to just cut to the chase, re-install ubuntu. A reinstall often is faster than spending hours trying to figure out how to fix a problem. Good luck.

[elija]

I don't know the specs on that machine, but you used to get that message (word for word) if you had a non-operating system floppy disk inserted in to machines. The same used to apply for zip drives and ls120's, so could you have something unexpected plugged in or indeed not plugged in?

Ah the good old days. For the youngsters

[friwise]

After doing some restarts and trying to see if my boot order was wrong (I changed it a lot of times) it gave me the message error: invalid environment block and now the image I have is:

Gave up waiting for root device. Common problems:
- Boot args (cat /proc/cmdline)
- Check rootdelay= (did the system wait long enough?)
- Check root= (did the system wait for the right device?)
- Missing modules (cat /proc/modules; ls /dev)
ALERT! /dev/disk/by-uuid/8a0b75c3-8f66-47a2-9a14-4eca2401317a does not exist.
Dropping to a shell!


BusyBox v1.15.3 (Ubuntu 1:1.15.3-1ubuntu5) built-in shell (ash)
Enter 'help' for a list of built-in commands

(initfrands)

[elija]

Just nosing around about the issue and I found this on launchpad from 2009.

The suggestion is to do the following

You need to be able load a live linux operating system that can write your your filesystem.

I used a live-usb drive. You can use the ubuntu install cd for this purpose.

After booting into the live cd based environment, you need to mount the partition on your main system that contains /boot.

Then you can make the necessary modifications to grubenv as per comments above.

cd /boot/grub
rm grubenv
grub-editenv grubenv create
grub-editenv grubenv set default=0
grub-editenv grubenv list
default=0

This should give a bootable system.

It appears to be something to do with an unclean shutdown and ext4

[friwise]

Is it possible to just reinstall linux from the same CD?

[MASONTX]

If you have a good live cd, you can install or reinstall from it.

[canineloop]

Have you tried booting with an MHDD live CD to check the hard drive's surface for damage?

If the computer ran "like it was dead" with Windows, maybe you're suffering pre-failure hard disk issues......

canineloop

[Xheralt]

Have you tried booting with an MHDD live CD to check the hard drive's surface for damage?

If the computer ran "like it was dead" with Windows, maybe you're suffering pre-failure hard disk issues......

canineloop

Define MHDD please? By context, I suspect you mean something like a PartedMagic livecd, something specialized for HD diagnostic/recovery work, but remember, not all of us know the jargon -- especially not the newbie OP!

Also, kudos for considering a (semi-obvious) option that others bypassed. Incipient HD failure was *my* first thought as well. Especially with this line:

ALERT! /dev/disk/by-uuid/8a0b75c3-8f66-47a2-9a14-4eca2401317a does not exist.

Reinstall-to-solve is a good option ONLY if you created a separate /home partition that can be preserved during install or have an external HD to back up your personal data to (boot with livecd to do).

[canineloop]

MHDD is a DOS-looking hard disk condition reporting/repair tool that's downloadable as a live CD or floppy disk.

It checks your hard drive's sector-by-sector condition. It represents its findings in tiny rectangles the colors of which display how good or damaged each sector is.

Light gray, darker gray, darker gray then green, orange, red and so on depending on the time it takes MHDD to access the sector.

It also allows you to "heal" damaged sectors by preventing reads/writes to them.

And thanks for the kudos! I know we're always supposed to blame software FIRST, but I've hit my head on that railing too many times to overlook it.....


canineloop