Unbutu will not boot from hard drive

I have recently downloaded Unbutu in ISO format and created the CD. I have a spare old Dell Optiplex  machine which had Windows 98 installed. I decided to use this machine to install Linux as a stand alone. I have followed instructions for manual partitioning and allowing Unbutu to partition automatically.

Everything is fine and both method find my wireless network and I can get onto the internet without any complicated set up. I have navigated around the applications and all looks fine.

I have set my bios to boot from hard drive and CD. However when I come to restart Unbutu fails to boot/ start up. The SCSI hard drive is relatively small at 20GB.

What am I doing wrong?

David Bate

Mmm, the key may be the use of the word SCSI (!)

SCSI is "generally" reserved for servers so I could quite imagine that the SCSI drivers are not loaded by default for a "desktop" Linux installation. The first thing I'd try is manual activation of the SCSI drivers at boot time ...

At boot time, when the "Press ESC" prompt appears, press ESC, then press "e" to edit the boot entry. Move down to the kernel/image line and press 'e', and add "doscsi" to the end of the line, then press "b" (twice?) to boot the system with that config.

If that works, edit /boot/grub/menu.lst, find the first kernel/image line and add "doscsi" to have it add this parameter automatically at boot time.

I am not sure if the Dell Optiplex GX150 BIOS is too long in the tooth. It is a cast off from a company I work with.

When booting up I get F2 Setup or F12 Boot Menu.

Pressing F2 shows that I have a

Primary Hard Drive 0

Primary Hard Drive 1

The SCSI must be the primary hard drive 0 but when boot error comes up it says no primary drive 1.

I am not sure how I can access the kernel/image line you mention.

Ubuntu will do a test on the hard drive as I can hear it whirring when running from the CD.

Maybe I should reinstall Windows 98 and run Linux in parallel? That is if the computer can recognise the SCSI drive.

Thanks for now

David Bate

See if you chose the correct patition to boot from as it could have chosen the CD drive at "setup" when integration at the end of setup occurred.

E.g. lilo.conf (on the hard drive) could have dev/ or mnt/ for removable device because you did not tell setup if you had any SCSI devices as it asks about SCSI near the beginning (you manually answer that questions although it has done some probing).

Try running the setup as an upgrade this time and manually go through the checkbox systems  carefully (although depending how the setup is done you may or may not need to add{name} partitions to be present or redo the partitions {not usually though}).