Grub install failed.

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zmatt

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I was installing Kubuntu on a partition on my hard drive today. It is a Western Digital SATA hard drive split up into one NTFS partition for windows and an EXT3 for Linux. At the very end of installation it started to install grub but failed and encountered a fatal error. Does anyone know whats wrong and how I can get grub to install?
 
An update. i went to the ubuntu forums and went through about 5 different ways to manually install grub and it still will not work. I get this error that stage1 doesn't exist. anyone ever have this problem?
 
yeah, i had that problem, but i just ended up reinstalling.

there is a grub-install command in the terminal.
 
I ran it. and it still failed. Its almost like grub doesn't know what to do with my hard drive. even after i manually mount the right directory, it still cant find the files.
 
when i had the problem, it was when i was installing wolvix on my flash drive (which is an excellent live distro and the best for flash drive booting) but instead of selecting the flash drive, i accidentally clicked my hard drive. as soon as it started "formatting 40gb IDE-0" i knew what i had done and clicked cancel, but the damage was done. i opened up gparted, and luckily it still said that there were like 4gb used, so the data was saved, but it was all gone when i opened it in the file browser. i couldn't find a way to recover it, so i just reinstalled.
 
That stinks but that has little to do with my situation. I manually mounted Sda5 in the terminal. and went to the directory with grub stage1. and everything was good. then i did sudo grub and tried to access it and grub said file does not exist. i can access and modify it in konquerer and see it in bash, why cant grub use it?
 
ok, sorry, i thought your data was completely gone. but i had a similar situation, where after i lost all the data i had the same grub error. is your partition table messed up? can you access your data on the hard drive from a boot cd?

you might want to boot of the xp cd, go into the recovery console, and type: fixmbr

then reinstall kubuntu.
 
Ive already done that. the weird thing is. even after i did a fix mbr and reformatted that partition. when i boot i have the windows vista boot loader. could it be vista that is messing with my mbr and stopping grub from working?
 
what i am thinking the problem is, you made your own partition. ubuntu/kubuntu will shrink the windows partition automatically. and then at the end of the installation you might have selected the wrong partition to install grub on.

so you should probably delete the linux partitions, and resize the windows partition to take up the whole hard drive. then try installing kubuntu and at the end, when it asks where to install grub make sure "mbr" is selected.

other than that, i don't understand why it wouldnt work.
 
No. what i did was i had two ntfs partitions from the get go. what i did was reformat #2 as ext3 and installed grub to the mbr. unfortunately grub keeps encountering error.

this sint the first time i have ever installed linux. but its the first time i have done it with this computer and with a SATA hard drive.
 
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