Comment 38 for bug 477430

I just spent several days trying to install 10.04 NBR on a Thinkpad 770Z (circa 1999). The machine was running SuSE 10.3 and would not run the Arduino IDE and refused to connect to my wireless AP with anything but bare WEP. I collected several hard drives so I could experiment while not disturbing the 40 gig SuSE disk. I tried Puppy and a couple versions of Vector but the distro that worked best was Ubuntu 10.04 Netbook Remix. I installed that from a magazine DVD on one of the spare drives and got WPA2 and Arduino 1.0 working with not too much trouble. I used xorg.conf from the SuSE 10.3 install to get 1280x1024 display.

Then started in on the 40G Fujitsu drive. It had 6 partitions, win98, swap, /, /usr, /boot and /home. I kept win98 and /home but used the installer gparted to merge /, /usr and /boot. Drive would not boot Grub said "out of disk" and dropped to rescue mode. An ls showed the correct partitions including (Hd0,5) which was where / was installed but ls (hd0,5)/boot gave the "outof disk" message. Read the release note about cylinder alignment, then backed up /home and tried deleting all the linux partitions and rebuilt them with gparted still leaving the win98 alone. "out of disk" error. Backed up win98 files and deleted and rebuilt ALL the partitions with gparted. Still "out of disk" after the install. I noted gparted, cfdisk and fdisk each gave different reports when looking at the partitioning in each one of these steps. What finally gave me a bootable disk was deleting all partitions and rebuilding with good old fdisk. I think I installed 10.04 NBR six times during this (minimum one hour for an install).

I have a gadget to plug a second hard drive into the CDROM slot on this laptop so in each of the iterations I was able to boot from the spare disk, mount the installed system partition on the 40 gig disk. and examine the files. In all cases I was able to access all information on the non-booting drive. Since grub2 consistently gave "out of disk" when attempting to ls the boot directory after a failed start, I can only conclude that this is a deficiency in grub.