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grantmeaname
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I screwed up...

Sun Dec 28, 2008 8:32 am

Yesterday I was installing Ubuntu 8.04 onto an 8GB flash drive I got for christmas. Unfortunately, it didn't really play well with the rest of my system. I think it changed the names of my external and internal hard drives, because I had to change grub.conf to avoid error 17. All well and good, I figured it out, the end.

I boot into windows. Crap. "NTLDR is missing. Ctrl+Alt+Del to restart". So I put in my BartPE disk and boot up and look at the C drive, and ntldr is right in the root directory (C:) like it's supposed to be.

So what do I do? Ubuntu isn't supposed to do that, right?
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titan
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Re: I screwed up...

Sun Dec 28, 2008 8:48 am

It sounds like you don't really understand how Linux works yet. Everything will be alright. I assure you!

Installing Ubuntu to your thumb drive isn't going to do what you think it should do. Linux will only see the thumb drive as additional storage space. It will still change the Master Boot Record (MBR), wherever that may be. (Unless you follow some steps carefully.) This is why NTLDR went missing. The MBR no longer knew where to find it.

It is possible to make a LiveUSB. Try following the steps detailed here: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/LiveUsbPendrivePersistent

One more thing: Linux will not change things at a low level unless you tell Linux to change them, as root. You devices, hard drives and such, may be displayed differently, /dev/sda1 instead of C:, but they haven't actually been renamed.
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grantmeaname
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Re: I screwed up...

Sun Dec 28, 2008 9:06 am

titan wrote:
It is possible to make a LiveUSB. Try following the steps detailed here: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/LiveUsbPendrivePersistent

Thanks!

titan wrote:
One more thing: Linux will not change things at a low level unless you tell Linux to change them, as root. You devices, hard drives and such, may be displayed differently, /dev/sda1 instead of C:, but they haven't actually been renamed.

No, I know that linux uses different names. I mean linux's set of names is different than before. My external hard drive became hd(0,6) instead of hd(1,6) in grub, and it stayed /dev/sdb in linux. I just edited grub.conf and now it works fine.

Now, what happened to what grub thought was hd(0), my internal hard drive that was and still is /dev/sda in Linux? And how do I fix my MBR and boot.ini?
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titan
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Re: I screwed up...

Sun Dec 28, 2008 9:19 am

grantmeaname[quote="titan wrote:
One more thing: Linux will not change things at a low level unless you tell Linux to change them, as root. You devices, hard drives and such, may be displayed differently, /dev/sda1 instead of C:, but they haven't actually been renamed.

No, I know that linux uses different names. I mean linux's set of names is different than before. My external hard drive became hd(0,6) instead of hd(1,6) in grub, and it stayed /dev/sdb in linux. I just edited grub.conf and now it works fine.

Now, what happened to what grub thought was hd(0), my internal hard drive that was and still is /dev/sda in Linux? And how do I fix my MBR and boot.ini?[/quote]
I see. Grub views things differently than the rest of the world. You'll just have to bear in mind that the count in Grub starts at (hd0,0), whereas Linux starts at /dev/sda1 or /dev/hda1.

You can use Grub to load Windows easily enough.

title Windows XP
rootnoverify (hd0,0)
makeactive
chainloader +1

Obviously, change (hd0,0) to suit your system. That will restore your system to "normal" operating procedures and allow you to have a dual boot system.
The best things in life are free.
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Guy 2: Alright, but don't call me Shirley.
 
grantmeaname
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Re: I screwed up...

Sun Dec 28, 2008 9:51 am

title Windows XP
rootnoverify (hd0,0)
makeactive
chainloader +1

Obviously, change (hd0,0) to suit your system. That will restore your system to "normal" operating procedures and allow you to have a dual boot system.[/quote]

I did that. It got me into windows, far enough for it to tell me ntldr was missing. :-? So now what do I do?
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Pizzapotamus
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Re: I screwed up...

Sun Dec 28, 2008 10:30 am

Maybe something in boot.ini for windows, pretty similar to grub.conf

as an example
[boot loader]
timeout=30
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional" /fastdetect

If you had to change the drive numbers in grub those disk(X) entries could very well need changing as well.
 
grantmeaname
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Re: I screwed up...

Sun Dec 28, 2008 1:57 pm

When I boot in BartPE it lists Music (the NTFS portion of the external hard drive that Ubuntu is installed on) as C: and Grant (my internal hard drive) as D:. I need to change that back, right? The problem is it's looking for NTLDR on C:, which now only contains music instead of Windows... Alternately, I could edit boot.ini to have everything the same but disk(1) instead of disk(0), right?
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grantmeaname
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Re: I screwed up...

Sun Dec 28, 2008 1:59 pm

So the file boot.ini on D: should look like this?
[boot loader]
timeout=30
default=multi(0)disk(1)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(1)rdisk()partition(1)\WINDOWS="Windows XP Media Center Edition" /noexecute=optin /fastdetect


Edit: Well, that didn't work.

Update: I determined that it all depends on the boot order in the BIOS... If the internal drive is set higher priority, it's designated C: by Windows and BartPE, but I get Error 17 with grub.conf. If the external drive is set higher priority, its NTFS partition is designated C:, my internal hard drive is designated D:, grub.conf works correctly, linux works correctly, and ntldr is missing because the MBR is messed up. How do I fix that?
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jarchack
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Re: I screwed up...

Wed Dec 31, 2008 9:01 am

You can probably get back into windows by doing a FIXMBR in the recovery console but first you'd have to copy the ubuntu boot image onto a floppy and then to the C: drive similar to dd if=/dev/hd(whatever) of=/mnt/share/ubuntu.bin bs=512 count=1 then put it on C:\UBUNTU.BIN="Ubuntu Linux" then give yourself 20 - 30 seconds boot time in the XP startup and recovery panel. It's been years since I've done this so I'm a bit rusty.

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