Ubuntu installs but won't boot from HD

Diss · 5 Sep 2011 at 15:35

Hi

I have just installed Ubuntu beta on a new hard disk. Now whilst its installed ok it won't boot.

I think i may have messed up the partitioning??

dev/sda1 ext4 15gb with the boot flag -- installed as root i.e. /
dev/sda2 ext4 375gb installed as /home
dev/sda6 SWAP
unallocated 1.4TB (going to be my win7 partition)

Normally i put all the Ubuntu stuff on one partition and it works fine - so am assuming i have set up the partitions wrong??

Any help much appreciated

thanks

diss

Niju Rosu · 5 Sep 2011 at 15:58

It looks ok I think. I don't remember ever setting a boot flag though, as far as I remember, grub doesn't bother with boot flags.

You can use the live cd and terminal to run fdisk to check if you didn't know.

Diss · 5 Sep 2011 at 16:03

thanks for the reply

it didn't boot without the boot flag either

so i assume fdisk won't help????

grub seems to be installed on dev/sda1 but it never starts - i just get a flashing cursor in the top left of the scheme

if its any help its a new mobo with the new bios (eufi or something) and its running on a 2600k with no dedicated graphics card - it runs all fine when i boot from the cd

Diss · 5 Sep 2011 at 16:09

gonna do a reinstall using the entire HD and see if that works - and if so i know its something i did wrong so will try again with any new info i get here

thanks

Diss · 5 Sep 2011 at 16:52

ok - did an auto reinstall which did something very interesting i haven't seen before

it set up a normal and swap partition but in addition it set up (according to Gparted) something esle i.e.

sda1 (unknown filesystem) size 977KiB with a flag bios_grub
sda2 ext4
sda3 swap

Niju Rosu · 5 Sep 2011 at 18:37

Interesting, don't think I've seen that before either. Just checked mine in gparted and I have:

/dev/sda1 - ext4 - / - boot flag
/dev/sda5 - swap
/dev/sda6 - ext4 - /home
1.18mB unallocated as well, strange.

Is this a beta of Ubuntu 11.10?

Diss · 5 Sep 2011 at 20:04

it is the beta - but i think the difference is maybe due to the new UEFI bios (which is very cool by the way)

BigglesPiP · 5 Sep 2011 at 22:18

Heh, running the bootloader in EFI, that's quite smart.

For those that don't know you can compile code to run on an EFI BIOS, there's even an EFI shell. We've done it on the storage controllers I work on for experiments.

I'm very tempted to get tools like prime95 compiled to run from the EFI shell on my PC, would be a great bootable tool.

@OP: Have you been to the Ubuntu forum? Would be good to get a high qualify defect open to sort out the release on your system.

Diss · 6 Sep 2011 at 08:02

BigglesPiP said:
Heh, running the bootloader in EFI, that's quite smart.

For those that don't know you can compile code to run on an EFI BIOS, there's even an EFI shell. We've done it on the storage controllers I work on for experiments.

I'm very tempted to get tools like prime95 compiled to run from the EFI shell on my PC, would be a great bootable tool.

@OP: Have you been to the Ubuntu forum? Would be good to get a high qualify defect open to sort out the release on your system.

not sure there is a bug - the install CD setup does install a bootable 11.10 - it was my manual instal and lack of understanding of UEFI bios that caused the problem

i have a new problem now in that it seems impossible to dual boot with a UEFI bios

see this thread http://forums.overclockers.co.uk/showthread.php?t=18314996

after a bit of googling i didn't find any easy dual boot solutions