n00b install problems - Ubuntu

Baser-X · #1 October 17th, 2007, 11:01 PM

Last night I was trying to set up Ubuntu on a Gigabyte 7IXE mobo w/ an AMD K7 (800mhz), 768MB RAM, Memorex 52x24x52 CD-RW, D-Link NIC, nVidia MX400 PCI, 40GB WD Caviar... All was going well and I got the partitions set (4.8gb ext3 primary, 2gb swap, and the rest as ext3 storage) and the install began and then the computer locked up. Went to reset and nothing, the board died on me... The computer gods truly hate me as they have taken 3 HDDs, a DVD-Rom and now the mobo in the last 10 days. Luckily I'm all about redundancy and didn't lose any data...

Anyway, so I swapped out the board with one had sitting around from an old HP. It's a PIII @ 600mhz and I used all the rest of the hardware listed above. Tried to install again and 1st off Ubuntu doesn't like that the BIOS are dated prior to 2000 (they are 1999) but it gets past that. My problem now is the partitioning. It doesn't like the existing partitions so I deleted all partitions and built them out again same as before. Now I get an error that the drive cannot be locked and it auto-reboots when I try to apply the changes to the partitions.... Any thoughts?

I'm thinking the MBR is hosed on the HDD.
FYI - This is an old drive from work that was wiped using NSA standards and has had nothing installed on it since. Also, prior to the error above I was able to boot from The Ultimate Boot Disk, now it goes straight to a "boot\" prompt instead of the usual menu and at the "boot\" prompt no matter what commands I try I get "invalid syntax" errors (except "help" - that command works fine.... :P). This is the other reason I'm thinking it's the mbr....

Anyway, any help would be appreciated. Also, since Ubuntu doesn't like my BIOS, is there another distro anyone could recommend that will ignore the age of my BIOS? I chose Ubuntu based on the link in The Dude's sticky thread... It said Ubuntu was my perfect match...

jmtjet · #2 October 18th, 2007, 12:01 PM

Have you considered getting the drive manufacturers diagnostic and setup tools and run them on the drive. If the drive checks out OK with the diagnostic tool reformat it FAT32 and start your install again. Let Ubuntu set up it's own partitions.

Hope this helps.

Baser-X · #3 October 18th, 2007, 04:57 PM

Thanks for the reply jmtjet, I did try the WD Diagnostics disk and no joy it said the drive didn't exist... I was finally able to get DOS 6.22 to boot from a CD and ran FDISK /MBR which did nothing for me and when I went into FDISK to see what was up it showed 1 partition of -238MB... What finally fixed it for me? I installed XP Pro and let it format out a 10GB partition for itself. I then installed openSUSE and it successfully created the partitions it needed and is now finally up and running as a dual boot XP Pro/openSUSE box. I haven't had much time to play around with it yet but I did get it connected to the internet through my LAN however I failed miserably at getting it to join my domain, Samba failed to install... I haven't had a chance yet to figure out what I did wrong, but I'm a total n00b so I'm sure it's user error....