[Discuss] Kubuntu reinstall GRUB boot problems

[Murray Strome]

I messed up my wife's computer (I accidentally deleted some "hidden" 
files in her home directory).  I decided to reinstall Kubuntu, but on 
different partitions so that I would not disturb her data. I planned to 
copy all the data files over to her new directory after the installation 
(I was able to find enough space on some partitions to do this). 
Everything went well until I tried to reboot. I did the installation 
from the Kubuntu Live CD for AMD-64. 

At first, I got GRUB stage 1.5
      Error 17

I searched around for this error and tried everything I could find on 
the net but all of the remedies suggested failed to work. 

I tried reinstalling several times, trying different places to install 
GRUB, (including the floppy) all without any luck.

For these installs, I set sda3 as /usr sdb1 as /  and sdc10 as /home and 
sdc8 as SWAP

I tried Smart Boot Manager, SuperGRUB, Universal Boot CD,  and several 
other utilities to try to boot into the system, all without success.

I couldn't boot into anything.  I eventually used a Windows 98 rescue 
floppy which did fix the MBR on sda1 to enable me to boot into Windows 
98. I then tried again to install. This time, I tried sda3 as / and sdb1 
as /usr.  Again, no luck with GRUB. 

I then tried using the Kubuntu Alternate AMD-64 CD and loaded Rescue 
Mode. One of the options there was to reinstall GRUB.  I first tried 
doing this on the floppy (it didn't actually do anything), then on 
(hd0), which would be sda1.  Neither worked.  When I rebooted with the 
floppy, it just said to remove disk and try again.  Then when I rebooted 
again, it booted Windows 98, indicating that it did not really change 
the MBR.

The Smart Boot Manager only recognizes the Windows OS, not LINUX (though 
it in the past it has always worked OK). I looked at the /boot file in 
the newly installed root partition and it looks OK.

I am at a complete loss as to what to try next.  I have spent a lot of 
time trying to figure this out, with no luck so far.  It is extremely 
frustrating to see that everything seems to be there, in the correct 
place but being unable to get to it to run the new installation. There 
must be some simple explanation as to what could be going wrong and how 
to fix it.

By the way, the disks are detected in the BIOS in the same order as by 
LINUX.

I have never had this difficulty with any other installation, though 
sometimes I have had to resort to using Smart Boot Manager floppy for 
booting.

Any new ideas? Thanks for any help

Murray

Further information:

sda  is Primary IDE Master
sdb is Primary IDE Slave
CD RW is Secondary IDE Master
DVD RW is Secondary IDE Slave
sdc is Master on PCI IDE Controller 1
sdd is Slave on PCI IDE Controller 1
All drives are set to Auto in BIOS (something someone suggested in one 
of the forums concerning the GRUB error 17 -- but this is the way they 
were so I didn't have to change anything).

IDE Controller 2 is not used (I think the controller is Promise 
Technology, if I remember correctly).