Re: Ubuntu 6.06 + Missing Operating System

Have you been able to boot successfully at least once since installing Ubuntu?
That would confirm that the boot loader is configured properly. Check the BIOS
settings for boot order. Floppies, USB ports, even network cards can be
prioritized before the hard disk. Most likely, a disk in the floppy drive or
USB key was left in and the BIOS tried it first as instructed. When no
bootable partition is found that is the message that appears. You can set the
hard disk to be searched first in the BIOS configuration to avoid this problem
in the future.

Mark

Thanks for your speedy responses..........

Yes, I have successfully booted this machine several times over the past year. There is no floppy in the floppy drive and no cd in the cd-rom. I tried setting the BIOS to boot from a USB version of FrenzyBSD to see if I still had data. This did not work. However, the USB pen is untested and may not be a working copy of FrenzyBSD. Let me explain my bootup system. The first time I installed Ubuntu I didn't know what I was doing (has anything changed? :-) I loaded the grub bootloader onto the wrong (second) hard-drive. I have two hard-drives in the machine. One hard-drive contains the grub bootloader + OpenBSD. The second hard-drive has 3 Ubuntu Kernels. The version of grub that Ubuntu installed has never seen OpenBSD and I have not booted OpenBSD on that machine since installing Ubuntu. Grub didn't see OpenBSD, and I don't know Grub that well. In essence, I was using the entire hard-drive to store less than one mb file of the grub boot loader. It looks like the booting hard-drive has failed (see below).

Howard R. Hamilton wrote

> First thing to check, is verify that the computer can still see the
> hard drive. What does the bios tell you is there?
>
> BUZ
IDE Channel 0 Master SAMSUNG SP1203N
IDE Channel 1 Master HL-DT-ST GCE-8527B

IDE HDD Auto-Detection sees the SAMSUNG 120 gig properly.
IDE HDD Auto-Detection shows the second hard-drive as having 0MB

My Ubuntu machine has been used to record gigs of audio with Audacity. I
just booted FrenzyBSD Live-CD to see if my studio data was still
there...and it is. However, the hard-drive with OpenBSD is not
accessible. Fortunately, this is not a serious loss. I haven't accessed
the OpenBSD hard-drive partition for some time. It looks like I have

1) a failed hard-disk
2) A Hard-Disk with with Ubuntu (and my recordings...thankfully) minus
the boot loader.

I checked the connectors to the hard-drive...doesn't seem to be the
issue. FrenzyBSD shows corrupt data.

Now? I should remove the second hard-drive? Make a boot floppy for
Ubuntu? How would I do this?
Received on Fri Feb 16 17:30:38 2007