I have recently encountered an error when i attempt to boot Ubuntu Linux. The GRUB boot loader returns "Error 18".
I have read that this is related to an improper partition table, something about the number of cylinders per disk being greater than 1024 and therefore out of the bios' range. Im not sure how this happened. Ive been running ubuntu on this pc for months without a hitch and now this has come out of the blue. My roomate has been using amule recently and that is the only new thing. How likely is it that a malicious intrusion via amule could lead to a boot error of this kind?
I dont want to lose the info i have on the disk so im reluctant to repartition the hd. My last backup was a while ago. What should i do?
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Very few of us play with Ubuntu and I haven't had any issues but there are some awesome Ubuntu/Kubuntu forums that deal with these platforms full time. You'd probably get faster answers there. Good luck and hopefully you won't lose any info.
I havent found the Ubuntu forums to be very helpful honestly. Theres so many people asking so many questions that i get the sense that few of the questions are satifactorily addressed, and if they are theyre addressed to a level of user that is beyond me.
Seems like editing my partition table without corrupting my old data shouldnt be that difficult and Ive gotten some good help here in the past.
If so. find your grub.conf file and look for anything that appears out of place.
OR, while you are booted with the live CD, copy all of you data from your drive(s) onto another PC or USB drive. Then blow away the partitions and re install.
To explain the link I sent you, you basically have to reinstall the OS. Do not do the "automatic" partioning when it comes to the partioning step in the install.
You should do manual partitioning and create a
/boot partition which is only 150 megs large.
The installer will then stick the os's boot stuff(kernel, grub files, etc) in that partition which will prevent the error 18 condition.
at the advice of topher i downloaded the ubuntu iso and booted from rescue mode of the live cd. the rescue was running fine until it began testing the suspect hard drive upon which it returned an error, frame buffer i/o error if i remember correctly.
from the shell i ran dmesg and the output was full of ide failures with an unknown opcode.
so at this point im figuring that its likely a hard drive failure of a physical nature..maybe a faulty head or a broken arm or somethin?...its a 5 year old western digital so a failure of that kind certainly wouldnt be out of the question.
i havent had a chance to download the updated flash bios or anything else for that matter but
to be continued..
im not sure what the i/o errors mean yet but im gonna look into it.
This says that there was an error on the harddrive, and that the command was aborted ("Command aborted"). As far as I have found, such errors once in a while mean nothing serious. As long as there are no "Uncorrectable ECC error"s or other grave errors like checksum error, bad address mark etc. it should be nothing to worry about. Such "aborted commands" occur e.g. when an unknown sector is requested, that is not present on the harddisk, buggy drivers (-> the driver sent a command that was not understood by the drive).
As I stated, you need to reinstall the OS doing a complete format. You will need to partition the drive with a /boot partition of 150 megs and the partition with a / partition and any addition partitions which you want. Typically you can just go with /boot and / but just know that this schema does not follow best practices
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