# GRUB loading. ERROR no such partition.... :(



## 101airborne (Nov 8, 2007)

I'm really tired at the moment so forgive me if this is in the wrong area. But my hp pavillion dv6000 laptop is giving me trouble. Every time I boot the computer it shows the post screen for about a half second and then immediately jumps to a screen that says:

GRUB loading.
error: no such partition
grub rescue> 

and after ">" there is a blinking cursor indicating a prompt. 

I originally had the system set up with 3 operating systems. Windows 7 32-bit, Windows XP SP3, and Ubuntu 9.10 . One day I decided to make the laptop a XP dedicated system. So, from XP I deleted the partitions that belonged to 7 and ubuntu and tried to reboot and recieved the GRUB loading, error no such partition message. My first thought was ok i can just pop in an xp disc and reinstall from scratch, except the DVD drive in this laptop gave out about a year and a half ago. So I tried to use an external DVD drive to boot an xp disc. The drive wasnt even recognized in bios and continued to return to the grub loading error. I got frustrated :upset: and proceeded to take the hard drive out of my laptop plug it into a desktop computer. Computer recognized it and formated the whole drive intsalled XP to it threw it back in the laptop and..... grub loading, error: no such partition. I think GRUB is used in ubuntu but not quite sure for what and how is it still there if I have wiped the disc? Should I use DBAN to absolutely wipe the drive and reinstall again?? ANY suggestions at this point would be helpful.


----------



## hal8000 (Dec 23, 2006)

At the grub rsecue prompt type:

ls

This will show drives and partitions that grub knows about.

You need to ask on the DBAN forum if DBAN can wipe the MBR, not sure if it can,
Formatting (wiping) a hard drive only wipes the partitions, not the partition table nor the mbr. Grub is installed in the mbr which is why it hasn't been removed.

You can get rid of grub by booting to the windows recovery console.
You would need to cd to the correct drive, this may be D: or E: then run
fixboot or fixmbr

This link may help:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/314058

You cant delete linux partitions from windows, so Im assuming you did a wubi
install (install linux side by side on same windows partition).
Next time you install windows you can replace the windows boot loader from
a live CD, which is another solution:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=622828
although the fixboot and fixmbr may be easier for you.
Hope that helps.


----------



## 101airborne (Nov 8, 2007)

Only problem is that my DVD/CD drive that is built into the laptop is inoperable. I am going plug the hard drive into my desktop and see if i can try your suggestions there. I will let you know how it goes.


----------



## hal8000 (Dec 23, 2006)

101airborne said:


> Only problem is that my DVD/CD drive that is built into the laptop is inoperable. I am going plug the hard drive into my desktop and see if i can try your suggestions there. I will let you know how it goes.


OK, there are many ways to get rid of grub you can zero the boot sector, first 512 bytes,
but its probably better to see what partitions are on the drive.

If you still have an Ubuntu CD, boot with this CD in your desktop computer, plug in the hard drive and open a linux terminal.
Post the output of:

sudo fdisk -l

This will list all partitions on all hard drives


----------



## 101airborne (Nov 8, 2007)

So I fixed the problem and thought I would share the solution. I took a look at some of the DBAN forums and it turns out that if you run a FULL disk wipe it does wipe the MBR. Individual partition wipes will not be effective in deleting a mbr. I tried several other methods before finally resorting to wiping the drive, but was met with no success. Fortunately I constantly backup my data so I didnt lose anything. 

I do have one final question. In the event that I am met with this situation again and want to change from a triple boot system to one operating system, how do I properly get rid of each operating system and their respective partitions without having to go through a process similar to this?


----------



## hal8000 (Dec 23, 2006)

101airborne said:


> So I fixed the problem and thought I would share the solution. I took a look at some of the DBAN forums and it turns out that if you run a FULL disk wipe it does wipe the MBR. Individual partition wipes will not be effective in deleting a mbr. I tried several other methods before finally resorting to wiping the drive, but was met with no success. Fortunately I constantly backup my data so I didnt lose anything.
> 
> I do have one final question. In the event that I am met with this situation again and want to change from a triple boot system to one operating system, how do I properly get rid of each operating system and their respective partitions without having to go through a process similar to this?


If you delete the 512 bytes of the mbr, then you wipe out the partition table and the disk is then useless unless you have a backup of the partition table.
fdisk /mbr deletes only the first 446 bytes so the partition table is intact, this must be the same with DBAN if you still have partitions.

With multi boot, you format the partition(s) of the unwanted OS, then modify the boot loader. If its grub legacy then its a single file /boot/grub/menu.lst
If its grub2 then running update-grub takes care of this automatically.


----------

