[ale] Hard Drive "boot sector" Question

[Michael Trausch]

The MBR doesn't hold much; there is only 446 bytes or so of space for
code in it.  Due to the extremely small code space; I'd suspect that
if a standard GRUB installation failed, that the drive isn't worth
keeping, though that's just my 2 cents.

Dell systems are the only ones that I know of that have non-standard
MBR code to be able to initiate recovery, and those systems only do so
when certain keys on the keyboar

On Sat, May 22, 2010 at 7:48 PM, m-aaron-r <aaron at pd.org> wrote:
> 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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