Here are the specs of my rather old desktop computer:
- Intel Core 2 Duo 2.41GHz;
- 2GB RAM DDR2 800 MHz
- Nvidia 9600 GT 1GB 128-bit
- Asus P5KPL-VM motherboard
3 HDDs:
- 160 GB Western Digital
- 320 GB Western Digital
- 1 TB Western Digital
After having Windows 8 installed and setting up an Ubuntu 12.04 install, I ran into a couple of problems. I decided to delete everything on the hard drives and tried a fresh Ubuntu install.
How do I setup all the partitions for all the drives? The only pointers that I found were for setting up partitions for only 1 HDD, but that didn't work for me. I followed these steps, but after installing and rebooting I get a black screen that says:
error : no such partition grub rescue>
I tried installing and running boot repair, but nothing changes. I still get that error and Ubuntu doesn't boot. Following the steps above, I have only partitioned 1 HDD, the 160 GB one, with a 4GB partition for the swap area and the rest of the available memory is for the ext4 partition - for my Ubuntu install. The other hard drives remain intact and are seen as free space. How can I partition all my drives and install Ubuntu correctly?
On the first install, I have stumbled upon some other problems as follows:
My motherboard has an integrated sound card (the only one I have available) Realtek Ac97, but after install only my front 2 speakers work. I have a 5.1 sound system that is connected via my 3 jack ports, rear speakers plugged in the auxiliary jack port, mid/subwoofer plugged into the microphone port. I followed another guide that said I should change the alsamixer channels from 2 to 6 (for 5.1), but I don't know if this works as my Ubuntu crashed because of my next problem.
Ubuntu asked me to update my Nvidia driver. It gave me a list of possible updates and due to my inexperience, I chose the one that had (Recommended) at the end of the line. It asked me to reboot, but after the reboot, I got to a screen full of loading commands with one faulty line:
Starting load fallback graphics devices [fail]
These 2 problems can wait because for the moment, I can't run anything on my desktop.
Edit: I installed Ubuntu from a USB flash that I made and there doesn't seem to be any problems with it.