More damned Linux nonsense

[Dogmudgeon]

I just installed Ubuntu 6.06 LTS. The installation went fine ... I think.

However, when I tried to boot it, I got the same damned error I got with 5.04 and every install of Kubuntu I tried -- it stalled on Stage 1.5, then announced ERROR 18.

ERROR 18 means that GRUB, or Linux, or something, doesn't want to be loaded anywhere but the first 1023 cylinders of the hard drive. So now Linux will boot and run off an X-Box, a tape drive, a Commodore 64, an 8-track tape, a memory stick, a digital camera, a portable MP3 player, toaster-ovens running Java, and presumably even an Etch-A-Sketch.

Just not a hard drive with more than 1023 cylinders.

The error that had been fixed in 5.10 has now returned in 6.06, and I have two "simple" solutions:

1. Get a new BIOS and blame everything on Bill Gates.

2. Move my WinXP partition (hoping it doesn't get hosed by parted, gparted, kparted, xyzparted, or Ghost) and blame everything on Bill Gates.

Yeah, I'll walk down to the BIOS store and buy a dozen. Or maybe I'll try to move the NTFS partition and get told that I've hosed my WinXP installation, requiring another 4-hour setup session. (Thankfully I saved the special Greedware file, otherwise I'd be on the phone to India for an additional hour just to be able to use my system beyond 30 days.)

I could also fix the file, right? However, I get another Very Weird Linux Error when I try to do it. I can't look at any of the hard disks because the system can't mount them. I mean, WTF? How hard could it be to build in support for hard drives?

And meanwhile, I'll blame everything on Bill Gates.

Okay ... is there any way to fix this in a relatively brief time? One that does not require a 2-day turnaround, a consultation with a local Linux geek who will also preach to me the virtues of Ayn Rand, a pricy mail-order purchase for a BIOS chip, or just giving up and destroying my WinXP install in order to place GRUB and/or Linux in the first cozy 1023 sectors?

I would love to deep-six the Windows setup right away, but have to maintain it for some legacy crap and about a ton and a half of VB code I've developed since 1997. If Linux is All That And A Bag Of Chips, then why can't I just install Linux fresh out of the shrinkwrap (or off the CD writer, as the case is) and have it work correctly?

--p!

[hobbit709]

1. Get a couple removable drive trays

and put Linux on one and windoze on the other. I've never trusted dual boot system because something always screws up. I use Win98, win2000, Suse 10.1 and Ubuntu. I even have an old drive with DOS on it.

[Dogmudgeon]

2. I just might be doing that

I already have one drive tray unit. My concern is that it's a physical, mechanical fix, not a logical one. That, and my income is quite low, and the $50 I'd have to put into the project would be better spent on other things.

I managed to recover WinXP bootability using MBRFIX. Still, GRUB is supposed to be the bees' knees, and it only ever worked on Ubuntu 5.10. My plan is to re-install 5.10 then upgrade from inside 5.10, which is supposedly do-able and stable. But I'm going to be doing a little research on that issue, first.

Ideally, I'd like to get something like Wine, only that can run Word 2003 without too many problems. Switching and re-booting seems like it would be a hassle. Wine handles Word 2000 pretty well, but I've developed new code for W2003 and may actually have a few old clients calling wanting support (probably the day after I finally dump Windows entirely).

Thanks for the tip, though. I'm glad to hear that someone other than me thought of it, but much better yet, actually did it!

--p!

[RoyGBiv]

3. This is not a Linux problem ...

I gather you've been told before to upgrade your BIOS. If so, there's a good reason for that.

GRUB is an operating system loader, not part of the OS itself. As such it works outside the OS, relying on the BIOS to function. Until fairly recently, BIOSes could not access anything above the 1023rd cylinder. Thus, GRUB cannot access those cylinders. *NO* bootloader can access those cylinders, which means you couldn't put the Windoze kernel up there either. This is not a Linux problem.

There are ways around this, but none of them are friendly to the way you have your system set up already. That is, you're going to have to do some rather intricate reconfiguring to get it all to work the way you want, reinstall Linux, and go from there. I have done this, but I won't do it again because it's annoying and stressful if you have data you're afraid might die, and I do not feel confident enough in my ability to explain it to try. You'd hose your system, and it would be my fault, dogs and cats would start getting married, and it just wouldn't be a good thing. I'll just say that it basically boils down to resizing your paritions so that you have room to mount /boot within the first 1024 cylinders. If the space Windoze uses is low enough, you could resize it so that it all exists within the first 1024 cylinders and mount /boot at the end. If Windoze is using too much space, you need to move it so that you can create a partition to mount /boot at the beginning of the drive.

Ah, hell ... there's gotta be a HOWTO on this ... virtual pause ...

http://www.geocities.com/epark/linux/grub-w2k-HOWTO.html

If you feel brave, try that.

All this said, heed hobbit's advice when and if you can. If you must use a single hard drive, consider backing up all your data and reinstalling everything, setting up your partitions with the intent of running a multi-boot system and allowing GRUB to handle the bootloader duties for the entire system. Be aware if you do this that Windoze doesn't work and play well with others and will overwrite the MBR every time you do something that updates the operating system, which means you'd have to keep a floppy with the MBR on it to restore when this happens. Linux doesn't have this problem. According to that HOWTO, some virus scanners don't like the MBR being occupied by something other than a Windoze product, but I've never run into that.

[Dogmudgeon]

4. Better late than never ...

Okay. I went back to the Windows system for work, but finally was able to install Ubuntu 6.06. I did it with the Alternative disk. Its version of GRUB works correctly with dual-boot systems.

Incidentally, it was a GRUB error, not a Windows error or disk controller/BIOS error. I DO have LBA enabled. The GRUB team is going to have to take this into consideration, since I checked out several Linux forums, and it's clear that I'm not the only one who has had this problem.

The problem now is that my install of KDE is broken, and I can't even log in. Not even into the default Gnome desktop. And while the standard advice seems to be "boot up with your CD and hack your way in with the command line", it appears that I am locked out of the command line, and have no idea how to "hack in".

I reported the bugs dutifully.

I guess what I really ought to do is to buy a cheap older computer, dedicated to Linux, and run a couple of different Linux distros that way. Sadly, like many other people these days, I'm dead broke. I have no doubt that the various dev teams are hard at work on the problems, and lament that all my skills are in Visual Basic and rhetoric. (Well, Eric Raymond's skills are sendmail and rhetoric, and he's done pretty well, eh? And he's not even a Democrat.)

I'm opening a new thread, too. This one was mainly whine. I need some programming advice on leaving Mr. Gates' mansion, and a whine thread just won't cut it.

--p!

[Recursion]

5. Try Gentoo?

I've found if X isn't working in a distro, after a few hours of RTFM'ing and IRC'ing and banging my head against a wall with Gentoo usually gets it to work.

Ditto openbsd.

[longship]

7. I run Gentoo on several machines.

I do not recommend Gentoo for anybody who is a Linux neophyte. Its installation, although much improved these days, would still be a nightmare for anybody who doesn't understand the inner workings of Linux configuration.

Many things are done manually on Gentoo. For many of us Linux geeks, that's what we want--total control. But for the neophyte, it would be a very steep learning curve.

Sure there are great docs on the Gentoo site, probably the best of any Linux distribution, but a newbie is not going to understand why and wherefore.

Plus, Gentoo pretty much requires a kernel compile to be completely effective. Many newbies have never attempted such a thing. Yes, you can install Gentoo without it, but then many of the wonderful Gentoo advantages disappear.

However, I use Gentoo for a good reason. It's the best damned Linux I've ever seen. It's completely configurable and adaptable with few assumptions. It's cutting edge. It's pretty damned stable. It has an extremely active dev community. It has, hands down, the best documentation in the business. It's as fast as greased lightning. It has a huge respository of software available.

[RoyGBiv]

6. Grub error ...

How so? Naturally you know your own system better than we could, but the problem as you described it before did not present itself as a Grub error, key on "as you described it."

As for the Grub team, it doesn't, and shouldn't worry too awful much about how it interacts with Windoze. One thing I've seen happen a lot that former Windoze users try to blame on Grub is actually Windoze not liking to be installed on a slave drive. The way Grub creates its default menu.lst doesn't take this into account (and shouldn't), but you can trick Windoze into thinking it is on a master drive by changing Grub's config.

Anyway, I'm just interested in what the problem actually was and in what way it was related to Grub. I've never had a problem with it except when using an older version and an XFS filesystem one time (this has been fixed), and I've tried numerous variations of OSes on the same system, using both single drives and multiple drives. Tweaking is often required, but I would be very surprised to learn that tweaking configs couldn't offer a solution.

[meldroc]

9. Can you get to a console at all?

Usually, if KDE or GNOME don't work, that's because X isn't configured correctly, meaning you need some way to fix /etc/X11/xorg.conf. In that case, you might want to check the logs in /var/log/Xorg.0.log and so on - they might provide clues as to where things are failing. You might want to do a sudo dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg and make sure you specified your correct video card and monitor settings.

At that point, yes, it's time to try to log in at the console. Can you get to a login prompt at all? Alt-F1 through Alt-F7 (or Ctrl-Alt-F1 - Ctrl-Alt-F6 from within X) will get you to the virtual terminals, which you should be able to log into assuming you have a user account and password set up (which should have been done during Ubuntu installation.) If you can't log in that way, see if you can reboot the system into single user mode (usually by typing "linux single" at the GRUB or LILO prompt if memory serves - that'll just dump you into a root shell prompt, bypassing most of the boot process, which is useful if something's really hosed.

Oddly enough I'm not having the problems with GRUB that you've been having. Maybe it's a different hard disk configuration, though I have a 300GB hard disk, with multiple partitions, and nothing's gone wrong so far. Frequently on older boxes, I've had to create a /boot partition close to the beginning of the disk to work around the 1024 cylinder limit, though on newer machines, I haven't had to do that. It's probably a BIOS issue - there are a lot of buggy BIOSes out there. What kind of system are you running? That would help me answer some questions. RAM, CPU, video card, hard drive, etc.

Don't know what to tell you. Maybe if you're having problems with Dapper (6.06), you might try Edgy (6.10) which was released just last month. I just upgraded my system to it, and it's been running great for me so far.

[Occulus]

8. What is this "special Greedware file" and how do I save it?

:D