[ale] Hard Drive "boot sector" Question

[Collin Pruitt]

On Sat, 2010-05-22 at 14:05 -0400, m-aaron-r wrote:

> I'm trying to do a favor for a friend by installing Linux on an older  
> (but
> serviceable) Compaq Celeron system of theirs that suffered death
> by windisease.
> 
> As delivered the system would fail to boot, though the hard drive seemed
> to be working fine when I pulled it and salvaged their user data by  
> hooking
> the drive up as an external disk on my Linux desktop.  I've returned the
> drive to their box and am now trying to install Linux on it using a  
> known
> good Live CD copy of Ubuntu 9.10 (erase entire disk and install option).
> 
> The installation runs fine and the disk gets re-formatted and written  
> to without
> reporting any errors. However, after install completion, the system  
> will not
> boot to the hard drive, reporting something like:
> "cannot find device #####-#######-######"
> I ran the install a couple times using both 10.04 and 9.10;  10.04  
> provided
> a GRUB shell prompt on one attempt.
> 
> I have since run a final test by swapping out the non-booting drive  
> with an
> old 20gig spare and have successfully installed and booted the system,
> so it's not the box it's the drive, and apparently only the "boot  
> sector" of the
> drive that is the problem.
> 
> Is there a way so salvage this drive or re-allocate the failing boot  
> sector??
> 
> (I'm not keen on handing back a system with an HD of questionable
> size, age and reliability, so I would prefer to salvage the 160 Gig  
> original
> hard disk if it's possible to do so with some confidence.)
> 
> Suggestions appreciated!
> peace
> aaron
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1. If you can't write to the MBR (Master Boot Record), then you have
problems. It might be better to just buy a new drive.

2. If you can write to the MBR, then GRUB should be replacing any data
in it with it's own.

You can nuke the data in the MBR by invoking the following command under
Linux with root access:

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda bs=512 count=1

Then just re-install Ubuntu or whatever. If that doesn't work, then it's
more than likely a problem with the drive itself; See #1.

---
Collin Pruitt
Ubuntu Member
http://hellow.ath.cx/
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