[ale] Hard Drive "boot sector" Question

[m-aaron-r]

Thanks!  These are all good notes.   I'll tinker a bit more tonight,
starting with trying to clean the MBR sector, and let y'all know
what works (or doesn't).

This disk came with an OEM recovery partition on it, so I'm thinking
there may be some residual windisease issues in the MBR.  I don't
think it's the bios, since the existence of that partition suggests this
is the original OEM drive for the machine.  It's also not that old,  
either,
given that Celeron processor is 1.2 GHz.


peace
aaron


On 2010/05/22, at 18:32 , Stephen R. Blevins wrote:

> In a previous reply, there was reference to the BIOS not reading the
> disk geometry.  Even with GRUB, I found I *had* to allocate a separate
> /boot sector at the beginning of the drive to get around the 1024-th
> cylinder issue.  YMMV.
>
> -- 
> Stephen R. Blevins
> stephen.r.blevins at gmail.com
>
> ------------
> [ale] Hard Drive "boot sector" Question
> m-aaron-r aaron at pd.org
> Sat May 22 14:05:56 EDT 2010
>
> 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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