Comment 27 for bug 551965

I seem to be having the same issue with HP a530n desktop PC, ASUS K8N8X-LA, HP/Compaq motherboard name: Diablo-UL6E with Ami BIOS and early Athlon64 3200+ (2 GHz, 1024K cache) from 2004.

When I installed 64-bit 10.04 LTS w/grub on a 500 GB USB WD Passport, it would boot fine on 2 laptops, but would not boot on this desktop (error: unknown filesystem). From the grub rescue prompt on that drive, or grub 1.97 on my main drive I could ls other partitions on the drive, but that partition kept coming up with unknown filesystem for the 10.04 partition.

So I installed 10.04 to a 160 GB WD Passport to try to rule out a BIOS issue, since I know that I was able to boot 64-bit 9.10 from that drive, and the PC came with a 200 GB drive. That likewise booted fine on the laptops, but not that PC (error: file not found). Even stranger was that grub rescue from that drive, or grub 1.97 prompt on my main drive, could show directories and files on the root of that partition. But from grub rescue, "ls (hd0,2)/boot" only returned a happy face symbol, and "ls (hd0,2)/boot/grub" returned error: file not found. From grub 1.97 prompt on my main hard drive "ls (hd1,2)/boot" displayed "STX" in a tiny font and then an endless stream of blank lines.

So I tried first recreating the partitions in gparted of 9.10, used the "partman/alignment=cylinder" parameter for the install CD, and used the partitions I had already created. I am now able to boot 64-bit 10.04 LTS from the 160 GB USB drive on the problem PC (and posted this from it).