[Discuss] Kubuntu reinstall GRUB boot problems

[Murray Strome]

Alan W. Irwin wrote:
> On 2008-03-03 21:49-0800 Murray Strome wrote:
>
>> I would like to understand what is going on. I have often seen an 
>> install completely mess up the MBR, but never before a case where it 
>> didn't even touch it! In other installations (even Kubuntu 
>> Alternate), I was able to install GRUB on a floppy, but so far I 
>> haven't gotten it to work on this computer.
>
> I wonder if you are the victim of some security feature?  For example, is
> there some BIOS change you have to do on that computer to allow you to
> overwrite the MBR?
>
> Alan
I have concluded that my problems were likely hardware related.  I 
removed the PCI IDE controller, and was still having problems. I could 
boot into Windows 98 SOMETIMES (not reliably), but couldn't fix GRUB. 

I ended up buying a new larger SATA HD for my Video editing computer, 
and removed the 200GB SATA drive from it and installed it in the 
computer with which I was having trouble.  My first step was to try to 
copy all the information from my old partitions to the new drive.  
During this process, after a couple of reboots, the BIOS came up with a 
message something like, "there is a problem with the Hard Drive on IDE 
0. It is likely to fail imminently. Back up all files immediately to 
avoid data loss".

I backed up everything I had on all the old drives using Kubuntu live 
CD, (as best I could -- I got some read errors from one partition) then 
removed all the IDE hard drives so I only have the new SATA drive in 
place at the moment.  I have successfully installed Kubuntu on it and 
now in the process of downloading all the upgrades. Once that is done, I 
will try to copy all of the /home files to the new system, and add in 
the medibuntu and other repositories I was using. Then I will have to 
try to reinstall things like Adobe Acroread, Thunderbird (hopefully I 
can get back all my E-mail, etc.), Firefox, Flash Player, etc. 

I now think it is likely that the IDE Primary Master Hard Drive, or 
possibly one of the others, was beginning to fail but this had not been 
detected yet by S.M.A.R.T. in the BIOS when I first started this odyssey.

I did copy over the Windows 98 partitions (using dd for the C-drive), 
but it will not boot. I guess the MBR for it has the leftover part of 
GRUB. When I choose Windows 98 from the GRUB menu, it just gives me a 
grub prompt -- a remnant of one of my previous attempts. I am not really 
worried about that.  The main purpose in even keeping it around was to 
do a few things with some hardware (e.g. LogiTech Color Page Scanner 
which has no drivers available for LINUX or later versions of Windows) 
and some HP printer maintenance items not available in LINUX.  I am sure 
that I have preserved all the data files (probably several times over), 
so it won't be a big loss if I never get it working again on that machine.

Thanks for all the suggestions and advice.  As best as I can determine, 
my problems were due to failing hardware, not the software or BIOS.

Murray