problems with grub

[nefariouscaine]

i did some messing around and installed a new HDD -- one of the Maxtor 300GB rebadged seagate 7200.10 drives

I did my windows install first as thats how I was told to do it -- ran my live CD and did some more partitioning to the drive

I have a 100 gig boot drive with windows on it and a couple other programs

a 170 gig empty ntfs drive waiting my games or other stuff

a 25 gig ext3 root drive with ubuntu 7.04 installed

and the remaining as a swap

it installs fine but when i do a reboot to end my live session it goes directly into windows

doesn't stop for grub to give me multi boot options and I don't know what I did wrong

I deleted all the above partitions minus the 100 gig windows one and "recreated" them again -- did an install after that and still got the same thing

I'm not sure why its not mapping my drive properly or initiating grub like before

**please help -- I am a *nix n00b

 

[drag]

Sounds like you didn't install the grub bootloader into the MBR.

I don't know what exactly went wrong, but some installers ask you if you want to install the bootloader into the MBR (master boot record). if it asked you should say 'yes' there. The way it looks now it seems like the bootloader got installed to the partition or to the 'MBR' of the wrong drive.

I donno something else.. maybe your getting 'drive' vs 'partition' mixed up? When I say drive I mean a physical harddrive.

( If you want to uninstall LInux later you'll have to restore the windows NTLDR bootloader into the MBR, otherwise your system would be unbootable. To fix this you boot into your windows cd into the recovery console and run the fixmbr program. )

 

[nefariouscaine]

I got grub to install -- kinda

I did a trace on grub after I removed my storage drives to limit the confusion and it was found on hd0,2 - which was my linux install partition (3rd partition)

it boots up to the grub menu but the only option that works is the NT loader -- I had this happen before and had to boot through the live cd (option to boot from first HDD) to get them to work right

I'm gonna have to wait til next week as this weekend is killed by a convention I'm going to but I'm looking at just doing a fresh OS install

my question is should I install ubuntu first or windows???

 

[drag]

The best way is usually to install Windows first then Linux second.

This is because Grub or Lilo is very easy to setup to boot multiple operating systems.. were as NTLDR isn't. This way by installing Linux second then grub/lilo should overwrite the windows loader.

If you install Windows second then you'll overwrite the Linux loader and only be able to boot Windows.

If you want to use teh Windows loader it's possible to configure it to boot Linux, but I've never used it before. Google around and you can find examples.

 

[PCTC2]

to boot using NTLDR, you have to copy linux.bin from /boot into the NT boot loader. google it if you want to do that.