Ubuntu

will not start after install

Asked by Ken

I have installed 8.10 4 times with no luck getting it to start up, the install goes fine but when it tries to start up I keep getting error 18 when grub starts and I have to restore my MBR so a can boot into XP. I have installed 2 ways, allowing the install to automatically partition & using the manual partitioning option. What's up?

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Shane Fagan (shanepatrickfagan) said : 		#1

This is the explanation I got from http://wiki.linuxquestions.org/wiki/GRUB#Error_18 about grub error 18
The BIOS is unable to start executing the kernel because the kernel is not located within the block it can access at boot up time.

Hope that helps

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Moe (affenkaraffe) said : 		#2

Did you install your Linux on a logical partition? As far as I know the BIOS cannot deal with logical Partitions. It only recognizes the underlying extended Partition and tries to read it's boot sector. So when the boot sector of your logical partition on which you have installed your OS doesn't match the boot sector of the extended partition (in fact I don't know if it ever does) I suppose the BIOS can't boot from that partition.
Whether you have a logical partition or not is easy to find out: their names are sda5 / hda5 and higher, as a hard drive can hold four primary partitions (of which one or more can be extended partitions which can themselves contain logical partitions), so the first four numbers are reserved for these.
Hope I could help with my awful half-knowledge :-)

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Shane Fagan (shanepatrickfagan) said : 		#3

I did a full install on the main hard disk. To boot you need to have specific info needed to boot at a certain area of the hard disk, The way ubuntu installs it moves microsoft's boot and replaces the start of the boot process with grub and lets you select between ubuntu and windows. If you want to install ubuntu on a logical partition install ubuntu using Wubi, if you want to create a separate partition for ubuntu use the partition editor on the install disk a main partition. If you install it on a logical partition it doesnt get recognised at boot time I think.

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Shane Fagan (shanepatrickfagan) said : 		#4

The url for wubi is
http://www.ubuntulinux.org/getubuntu/downloadmirrors#wubi

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