Ubuntu
grub package

i got the black screen of death

Asked by Raul

ok... this is the deal, i "friend" of mine sold me out Ubuntu and told me all the great stuff, i was impress and i saw it working in other people's machine and look great... however when installing it in my almost new Sony VAIO laptop something went wrong and now i can't neither start vista nor Ubuntu... unfortunatelly Sony doesn't provide recovery disk and my so call "friend" left me hanging...
this is what i want (if someone please can help) i want to bring my laptop back to the way it was (period). i just bought a new 1TB HD that i want to use for Ubuntu.
is there any one in here who can help me?!

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W. Prins (wprins) said : 		#1

When you boot, do you get a boot menu asking what you want to boot? (E.g. Vista or Ubuntu?) Put differently, what option did you choose when you installed Ubuntu? Did you free up space from your Vista partition, or did you tell Ubuntu to "use the entire disk", thereby deleting anything already on the disk?

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Raul (raulkerstin) said : 		#2

Thanks for your reply... however this is my current status i re-installed Ubuntu to a external 80 GB HD, installation successfull, ubuntu is running and looks great... however, if i unplugged the HD the laptop does not launch Vista - i get a Scrub error 21, i also tried to play with teh BIOS but not luck, i rest to default no luck... so am partially handicap and frustuated, cause even with Ubuntu some of the features of my laptop does not work (but i can understand)...
whoever you are, i certainly appreciate your response and i thank you for it, would you be able to help me still with my problem?

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Tim Potter (musikgoat) said : 		#3

Raul,

Grub error 21 : Selected disk does not exist. This error is returned if the device part of a device- or full file name refers to a disk or BIOS device that is not present or not recognized by the BIOS in the system.

What seems to be happening is during your installation, you told the computer to install the bootloader (GRUB) to the USB disk, and told the MBR (Master Boot Record) on your internal disk to go to the USB disk to be able to boot.

So, to boot, your internal MBR is read and asks the USB disk for the operating systems to boot (vista and ubuntu), and then goes to which ever location for the operating system. (This is what I'm gathering from the information you've explained, I could be wrong)

I believe the best solution would be to run the Ubuntu LiveCD, and from there, re-install GRUB on the correct disk.

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/GrubHowto#Backup,%20Repairing%20and%20Reinstalling%20GRUB

When you are in the LiveCD, you could open up pidgin, create an IRC account for some username on the irc.ubuntu.com server, and go to channel #ubuntu for more specific help during the process.

Can you help with this problem?

Provide an answer of your own, or ask Raul for more information if necessary.

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