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OK. I installed Ubuntu 10.04 a week or so ago over an old Ubuntu partition - no problem. Grub went on fine (it had previously been overwritten by windows).

Then, after remembering how much I like Ubuntu and using a terminal I thought I'd upgrade to 10.10 and increase the size of my Linux partition (the ntfs partition on that drive was barely used).

After doing this I continued the Ubuntu installer... all was fine until near the end when I was told that it had failed to install Grub... I attempted to install it on any of my other partitions and they all failed with the same message (though I'm not convinced they even tried). I then went back to the 10.04 CD and tried that again, same error, grub wouldn't install anymore.

Is this due to grub already being in the MBR or have I broken something when I partitioned?

Partition table is below:

Disk /dev/sda: 320.1 GB, 320072933376 bytes 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 38913 cylinders Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes Disk identifier: 0xdeb64491

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System /dev/sda1 1 24352 195599609+ 7 HPFS/NTFS /dev/sda2 24352 38560 114130859+ 83 Linux /dev/sda3 38560 38914 2839553 5 Extended /dev/sda5 38560 38914 2839552 82 Linux swap / Solaris

***Please note that I've since installed grub manually and have Ubuntu setup the way I like it, so I don't want to overwrite the whole install again if it's unnecessary. If I need to test any of these answers is it possible to do without reinstalling the system files?

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  • Did you resize the partitions via the installer or via some other program? Oct 16, 2010 at 8:02
  • can you run sudo grub-install /dev/sda (it might be /dev/hda, so run sudo fdisk -l first!!!!) from the live cd and see if it works or gives any errors?
    – RolandiXor
    Oct 28, 2010 at 17:51

1 Answer 1

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Sounds like you were installing grub to the partition instead of the entire disk. To make sure of this you should run the grub-install command manually:

sudo grub-install /dev/sda

Remembering to replace sda to your disks sd name if you have more than one physical disk.

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