Ubuntu
ubiquity package

10.10 install failure - ends w/ bad io...

Asked by Mike Bahr

I am attempting to install by first linux system.

Downloaded the latest 10.10 Ubuntu. Burned the iso to a CD. Had the writer verify the burn against the original. All is ok.

Rebooted with the CD. I have Windows Vista loaded on one hard disk and want to load Ubuntu onto a separate hard disk. So directed it to install on the new disk, using all the space, etc. (the CD/DVD, and both disks are SATA devices). Everything seems to go well. When I accept the reboot prompt, it seems to shutdown nicely, but than prints out about a 100 lines of some sort of IO error, and with a block 53,??? listed as offending. This has happened multiple times.

Is this a bad block on the disk, or is there some other problem going on?

-Mike

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Mike Bahr
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Ubfan (ubfan1) said : 		#1

Did you get a grub prompt to select Windows or Ubuntu? Where did you install grub (on the second disk, or on the original windows disk)? Can you still boot windows? You might have a hard disk problem, but if you don't even see the grub prompt, maybe grub cannot find its files. Used to be that the grub files could not be on an ntfs filesystem, so the trick was to install them to a FAT partition which many windows systems still have around.

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Mike Bahr (mbahr) said : 		#2

No grub prompt on any of the attempts, asking which OS to boot.

Here is my latest....

I have Vista installed on sdb. My new disk, for installation of Ubuntu, is sda. I want to leave sdb alone as much as possible, and install Ubuntu on sda.

It's true that the partitioning screens ini 10.10 are very unuseful. And, I didn't find anything useful in the documentation on how to accomplish this. However, I did find http://members.iinet.net.au/~herman546/p24.html which is very useful.

My latest attempt followed that guide. Setup a data partition and a swap partitin on sda. Told the installer to locate grub on sda. After the install, when it asks to reboot... after letting it reboot it seems to shutdown a number of things and then it ejects the CD, and then it prints out the io message (give me an e-mail and I can send an image of it). I pushed the CD back in and it finished up shutting down. But when it rebooted it went back into Windows.

1) Is the premature CD ejection causing a problem?
2) Should I tell it to put grub on my windows disk (sdb)? (I'm a little nervous about wrecking my windows setup...)

-Mike

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Ubfan (ubfan1) said : 		#3

You do not need to put grub on the windows disk if you can boot off the other one. See if the BIOS allows you to select which disk boots first. If such choice is not available in the BIOS, you must make the Ubuntu disk with grub the Master (may have to switch cables or change jumpers on the disks depends on your setup). I distrust the cable select, and prefer to set the jumpers on the disks appropriately. Most disks have pictures on them of the master/slave jumper positions.

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delance (olivier-delance) said : 		#4

If you boot directly from Windows, it means that BIOS see sdb as first disk. Unfortunately, Ubuntu installer doesn't use always BIOS disk order. As said Ubfan, you need to switch disks from the BIOS point of view.

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Mike Bahr (mbahr) said : 		#5

That worked.

thx.