Ubuntu

Ubuntu install on new harddrive not working - XP Crashed on old

Asked by prabhuft

Hi - my friend's XP crashed and we could not get it back on. So bought a new 320 GB hard drive, and installed UBUNTU on it from my computer at home (HP Win XP), and also have the cd used to burn image (8.04 LTS edition for standard computers). However, when i connected the new harddrive to his computer, disconnected the old one, and powered on with or without the cd we cannot get Ubuntu up and running. With CD, it goes till the point where the orange progress bar indicator moves up and down, then starts from left end and invariably hangs up after three bars. The CD worked fine on my comp - i did a use without install option. The broken computer is a Gateway AMD Athlon X2 desktop, with 1GB RAM, the old HDD was 250 GB, new one is a SATA 320GB. It does not have anything on it except the UBuntu installed on it, when i ran it from my machine. This machine is a little over a year old, and pretty standard config.

Questions:
1. Can i install Ubuntu on a new HDD by connecting it to mine as i did and should this work?
2. do i have to erase the UBUNTU install on the new HDD and redo it differently? The CD would not install or progress more than the three bars, when the new HDD was empty either. So this tells me something else is wrong which is preventing Ubuntu instal...

Any help will be appreciated. thanks
Prabhu

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prabhuft (prabhuft) said : 		#1

HEre is what I did so far:

I tried the CD instal with the old HDD, tried the CD with new HDD. Changed BIOS appropriately when trying to boot from CD or from new HDD with Ubuntu on it.

What is different now is the new HDD is SATA and the old one is not a SATA - generic that came form mfr. it is showing up on the BIOS.

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dave.com (dwmac) said : 		#2

My comp has 2 320Gb sata and a 60Gb ide(windows disk hehe), I too also experienced as well this difficulty and could not get my XP back no matter what, even the installation cd would not run it hung at 'installing windows'. That's even when I isolated the ms OS drive and it was the only hard disk installed in comp. I got the linux rescue.iso and a utility win32 parted and got that installed on the windows box after a long time getting windows up (it would restart but with stop errors). The win32parted thingummy I used to set the active disk on partition table, aka remove teh mis-flagged mbr, and later to resize linux root (option from boot up selection not on XP desktop) and make a extended partition for swap. I believe it helped that I uninstalled SP3 and re-installed SP2 with a clean XP install (including the ite8211 atapi controller driver my board uses) via F6 in the XP installer. Had a think and there were installshield conflicts between windows installer and software security protection in proprietary game installer which along with SP3 left some gaping page conflicts in mmc services.

Long story short, the Ubuntu cd became a lot smoother, tended to stay up on its feet and install stuff after that.

My opinion: Perhaps do not set 'boot' flag on the windows partition (nor even have partman muck with it yet). For all I can tell there is some cross-talk on what devices the resident OS can see at install when you have a drive marked active tho no task performed on it (that you know of). This measure is simply a precaution against that. I also made a /boot partition (primary) on the Ubuntu installation. Now I am getting Grub boot WinXP but it is not seeing my Linux root partition. Hehe I have problems of my own :) I am rather new at the Grub/menu.lst kernel line entry stuff as far as 2.6.24-19-x86/generic goes.

You should get your XP installation disk and copy onto a floppy your motherboard sata/ide controller driver first. Load installation cd, select F6 option and pop floppy in.. when your asked to select the mass storage installation naturally highlight XP and press 'S', next step is to continue onwards to the Recovery Console so choose 'Repair' rather than install XP all over again. Do a fixmbr /? and then a fixmbr per the options suiting your windows installation drive. Exit and check BIOS setup looks for the drive you have installed XP to in Boot tab or wherever for your board's BIOS, if you had more than one (as you seem to have 2 drives since you got teh 320Gb sata like me).

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