I had to re-install Suse 11.0 which booted fine and still had lost my boot files for my old gutsy release of ubuntu studio. In the past, installing ubuntu and it's grub would add all other distros to the menu.lst including Windows.

I then had to reinstall hardy next with the alternate install DVD. At the first install, I could boot into hardy or the chainloaded windows XP. But I had erased my whole separate /boot partition so the Suse boot files were gone or unlinkable. So my second round of installations and up to hardy, I noticed that this time in the alternate install, the nomenclature for my drives was reversed!

For the first hardy install, my first drive, as is set by bios boot order and reflected by the ubuntu partitionnner, was sda, my second drive, sdb and my 3rd, sdc. My /boot partition is situated on the "first drive" which is actually an IDE. I had succesfully installed grub on sda1 (my first drive) with the ability to boot into hardy.

For my re-install of hardy, the partitionner reversed the order; calling my first drive sdc, my second drive sda and my third sdb. So when I was asked where to install grub, I opted for sdc1 following the present partionner naming scheme and grub was installed. But when I try to boot into any listed entry now, I get error 15, file not found or no such partition exists (for my gutsy install sdc8).

In gparted, all my installations and data partitions seem to be there but I can't access any of them now! (My new suse 11.0 that I installed just before ubuntu, my windows and my gutsy for which I had wiped out the boot path or files).

I suppose that my boot partition to install grub on, is really on sda1, thus I must ignore the sdc designation by the partitionner... Also my IDE is called a SCSI1 (0,0,0) and my second drive (an actual SCSI) SCSI3 (0,0,0) and my third drive (actual SCSI)SCSI3 (0,1,0) . I hope that the ubuntu dvd installer is giving the right designations...

I should add that it is an alternate install DVD of Ubuntu Studio, not that this changes much in grub or partitionning. Any one can help me confirm that this is where to put /boot after I re-install yet a 3rd time? I tried recovery but can't re-install grub without renaming and designating all the other partitions, it seems. I really hope I can be helped becuase I've not used Ubuntu now in weeks and I'm stuck back in windows...

I reported this as a bug in launchpad; I wonder if my media disk has corrupt files- I don't know if I can do a md5sum in windows...
Anyone familiar with grub nomenclature and ubuntu will be appreciated greatly!

Start by booting from the live CD, then post the output for:

fdisk -l /dev/sda (same with other disks) and tell us what's on each disk/partition.

Rather than reinstalling, explore with the live CD to see what's there. Then hopefully it's only a matter of setting up the bootloader correctly.

While installing, did you remove any HDs or swap them around?

Hi I will have to get back to you with the ouput from from the live Cd (as I will have to do work on windows on that computer for now (yes it's still intact, I had to switch the bios order temporarily) but I did discover that this issue has come up as a bug in Ubuntu where the installer does not follow the bios order as it should. This is vital for my /boot partition and grub which need to be in drive 1. or sda for grub to function properly. I may have to re-install and make sure that the first drive and / on the 3rd drive sdc are particularly in the right order in the partitionner... as they were designated when I first installed hardy.

I will do a md5sum check of my DVD to be sure (I only checked the disk with the on disk inegrity check)
What I am really worried about is my SUSE install (2cnd time-it has to be configured specially and it is very time consuming) I don't want to re-install it again but this time grub did not even enter it on the menu.lst as grub had when installing GUTSY version previously! This is bad as I am counting on Ubuntu's grub to find all my OS entries as in the past- SUse never gets them all correctly either. I am even less familiar with suse so do not know how to get the boot files working- although the suse installer did seem to reverse the drive order as well and it had installed its grub on sdc1- I beleive.

I looked at things in gparted and everything seems to be there-even boot files (I mean graphically represented andlabelled correctly)...will post fstab soon!