Can't boot, either OS Grub error 2

I'm not sure how you managed to get RAID set up unless it's part of the hardware (not common unless it's a server). Before we can do much, however, we need to see the state of the various drives. Boot the live CD (the one you installed from) and open a terminal (applications -> accessories) and type

sudo fdisk -l

That is a small L at the end. Paste the output here and we can go from there. However, it's possible that you did install over windows. Unless there were changes made, windows is usually installed to the first hard drive which would be called sda by Linux. But don't panic yet. Let's see the output first.

Raid was already set up when I checked the computer. It's a huge one used for extensive statistical analysis but I don't think its a server.
Here is the output:

Disk /dev/sda: 250.0 GB, 250000000000 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 30394 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x00000080

   Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 * 1 29262 235046983+ 83 Linux
/dev/sda2 29263 30394 9092790 5 Extended
/dev/sda5 29263 30394 9092758+ 82 Linux swap / Solaris

Disk /dev/sdb: 250.0 GB, 250000000000 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 30394 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x00000000

Disk /dev/sdb doesn't contain a valid partition table

Disk /dev/sdc: 250.0 GB, 250000000000 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 30394 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x08000000

   Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sdc1 1 30393 244131741 7 HPFS/NTFS
ubuntu@ubuntu:~$
ubuntu@ubuntu:~$

Well, chances are that the various drives were set up to be a raid array probably for backup purposes. Often 3 drives are used as 2 allowing one drive to fail but the system will continue to run. It looks like Ubuntu was installed to the raid array overwriting windows. Since it's a raid array I don't know if it's possible to rebuild windows but installing over windows probably would have wiped out that option.

As for why ubuntu won't boot I'm not sure. It's possible that grub is set up wrong given the raid array. Can you post the contents of /boot/grub/menu.lst?

Oops, just looking over this again and I see I goofed. /dev/sdc1 does show a windows file system and only the first two seem to be raid (based on the limited info from fdisk). Sorry about missing that. Hope I didn't panic you too much.

As for why you can't boot, that still needs to be explored. Post the /boot/grub/menu.lst contents and we can go from there.

Hi Jim,
I tried typing /boot/grub/menu.lst into Terminal on the live CD and it came back as "no such file was found". Please let me know hot to proceed. Thanks!

I am also trying to receive help on another forum, I was wondering if there's any way to tell if my setup is a RAID 0 or RAID 1? Anyway, I'm going to try and burn and boot the SuperGrub CD (I hope it walks me through the process because I am an absolute beginner), but I would like to try and post the contents of /boot/grub/menu.lst, is there a reason why it's coming back "no such file was found"?

Hmmm, I posted a reply yesterday and it isn't here. Odd.

/boot/grub/menu.lst is just a path, not a command. To find the menu.lst you would either browse to it or in a terminal type

cat /boot/grub/menu.lst

That will dump the contents into a terminal.

I'm not real knowledgeable about RAID (currently dealing with my own issue too). There is probably a way to find out but I would just look at size. RAID 1 is mirroring so the contents of one drive are exactly the same on the other. That means two 500GB drives will still only hold 500GB. RAID 0 is striping. It writes half to one drive and half to the other. It increases speed but also storage as 2 500GB drives would hold 1TB of data. This increases speed and storage but there is to way to recover if one drive fails.

Well, I tried typing in cat /boot/grub/menu.lst into terminal and it came back, "No such file or directory". Sigh. I'm getting kind of scared!

Here is what the details of my RAID array look like:
Array 1: NVIDIA STRIPE 465.66G
RAID MODE: Striped
Stripe width: 2
Stripe Block: 64K
Port SATA 0 Index 0 Capacity 232.83G
Port SATA 1 Index 1 Capacity 232.83G

I also tried to boot SuperGrub from a USB device, but when trying to install it onto the pendrive after untarring like this:
sudo grub grub>
device (hd3) /dev/sdc grub>
root (hd3,0) grub>
setup (hd3) grub> (this is where I encountered a problem, it said "Error 11: unrecognized device string". I tried the command "setup (hd3)" alone and it came back "Error 17: Cannot mount selected parition")
quit $ sync
And it returned "Probing devices to guess BIOS drives. This may take a long time.

After rebooting, I couldn't boot from the USB drive. I will try burning the CD instead to see if I have better luck, and let you know how that goes.

But is there a reason I can't find the contents of /boot/grub/menu.lst?

If you are using a live CD you might need to mount the drive. Since it's a raid drive, however, I'm not sure how to mount it - especially a striped raid. If you can figure out how to mount it, you should then be able to see the menu.lst using the full path. For example, if you mount it to /media/disk then you can see the contents with

cat /media/disk/boot/grub/menu.lst

As for mounting the raid drive, you will probably need to install mdadm and then make the mount point. However, I don't know how exactly to mount your raid devices. Sorry.

The output of

cat /proc/mdstat

might help but you will have to install mdadm first.

I booted the SuperGrub CD, and I was unable to boot either Linux or Windows. I played around with it extensively and continually got Error 15s or Error 17s. I did manage to take a look at the /boot/grub/menu.lst file, but I wasn't sure how to copy it in order to post it here.

When looking at my partitions, hda(hd0 in Grub) shows a Linux OS hdb (hd1) shows a Windows OS, and hdC(hd2) is empty.

Right now I would just like to be able to boot anything. Will reinstalling Windows work? What is the next step? Surely tryin to install Linux hasn't damaged this computer IRREPARABLY, right?

It is likely repairable but not necessarily recoverable (meaning you may need to reinstall). Your fdsik output above shows a windows partition but that is all. It doesn't show if it has a working install or not. You should be able to boot the windows cd and use the repair tool to get windows working again. The ubuntu install is also probably working but some issue with grub is preventing it from booting. Knowing the contents of menu.lst would help troubleshoot that. You should be able to boot a live cd and copy and paste that info here. There may be an issue with raid that is making it hard for grub to "see" the boot info but that's only a guess. Your menu.lst should probably look like

root (hd0,0)

for the ubuntu line. If not, that may be part of the issue. It's also hard to know if the kernel line is pointing to the right drive since the UUID is difficult to interpret. The UUID is a unique name for each partition. If you can boot a live cd, the blkid command in a terminal will give you the UUID for each partition so you could compare. If the UUID for /dev/sda1 doesn't match the one in menu.lst that also points to a possible reason for the problems.

This sounds remarkably like the problem I am having with Ubuntu, 8.04 in my case. I have a Dell XPS 720 and it is configured with firmware RAID0 on the 2 250GB drives, sound familiar? If you boot and almost immediately hit F12 to enter the system setup and go to the disk subsection you can disable RAID on SATA1 and SATA2 (the first two or only two hard drives). Then you should be able to boot Ubuntu. The question still remains, however, why Ubuntu does not honor the bios raid where Windows, and Fedora both do. The operable part of that sentence is Fedora boots just fine and installs LVM over the two drives creating a large and fast single logical volume. So it appears, for the moment you can either run Ubuntu on an, arguably, crippled Dell system or go to another OS, either Fedora if you like Linux or Windows if you like slow. For myself, I want to run Ubuntu on the Dell the way Dell intended it to be run, with bios RAID 0 enabled. Seriously though, I have not found anyone to explain why Ubuntu does not honor the firmware raid setting where, clearly, there is nothing in Linux to prevent it.

I was able to resolve a similar situation where install of Ubuntu 8.04 was failing miserably with GRUB error 2 (after stage 1.5) by selecting "full disk / auto LVM" during disk partitioning - ie switching from non-LVM to LVM mode.

This was seen when trying to squeeze an Ubuntu 8.04 guest image onto a Citrix XenServer 4.1 virtualization server.

Seems that the Xen hypervisor (without xe-guest-tools) shows similar behavior as BIOS RAID controllers, so maybe LVM can help you people trying to install a non-virtualized host but using BIOS RAID?

No, it's clearly broken, sadly.

LVM mode using the alternate install image does not recognize multiple hard drives, SDA, SDB. I manually added the second drive and built up LVM such that it reported a single logical volume with the combined space of both physical volumes. However, the kernel only recognized that first single volume, not the logical volume LVM2 'knew' about.