GRUB hell

Two days ago I decided to install Linux on the new computer I had obtained, so I just got a Kubuntu 6.10 alternate CD and went through the steps. THe network card was not detected, but by reading around I found it was just a matter of the r1000 module not being present in the installation kernel. The problems arose when GRUB was installed.

Actually, that part of the installation went fine, but once rebooted I got “error 21”, which meant “disk not found”. Looking around in the Ubuntu bug tracker showed that GRUB did not support the JMicron SATA controller of the motherboard (I put the disk there by mistake, instead that on the ICH8 controller). Well, I wanted to remove GRUB, and that’s where problems started to arise.

I tried installing LILO but it did not remove part of the GRUB code. Then I just rewrote the MBR with the install-mbr utility and yet it didn’t work. I tried to use something called Super Grub Disc to restore the Windows bootloader, but since the CDROM was on the PATA controller (JMicron) GRUB wouldn’t load properly.

I swapped controllers then GRUB worked, but Windows wouldn’t boot. I loaded Linux (disabling IOAPIC and therefore one of the cores of the CPU) and checked the NTFS partition. Its boot sector had become corrupted somehow. Passing the mount option errors=recover enabled me to mount it using the backup boot sector. What to do to restore it? The folks at Microsoft suggested to use a disk editor(!!!) to manually copy it to the main boot sector. Luckily I found a program called TestDisk that was in the Ubuntu repositories. It recovered the backup sector and copied it to the main boot sector. I was able to boot into Windows again (how come Microsoft designed a backup in NTFS and is unable to use it in Windowss?).

In short, it was a mess that lasted seven hours.