[PLUG] PGE killed my desktop

[John Jason Jordan]

On Wed, 09 Jul 2008 22:02:16 -0700
"M. Edward (Ed) Borasky" <znmeb at cesmail.net> dijo:

> Does it boot a Hardy Heron LiveCD? I'd think that would have a better 
> shot at finding the partitions than Knoppix.

Thanks for the suggestion. It solved my problem, but not the way either
of us expected.

It did, indeed, boot a Hardy live CD. But when I checked in Nautilus it
did not find the hard drives either, same as Knoppix. 

However, it did find something else - a partition called "Windows
Backups," which it said it could not mount because the NTFS file system
was corrupt. Aha! At that point I remembered that I had added a 160 GB
USB drive that had at one time been used on a Windows system for
backups. In fact, I knew that the file system on the drive was bad and
had intended to reformat it to use for distro downloads. 

Acting on a hunch, I disconnected the USB drive and rebooted the
computer without a live CD. My old Hardy came up as usual and all is
back to normal.

My apologies to PGE. It was the flaky USB drive that was causing Ubuntu
not to boot. Having said that, a flaky external drive should not cause
the main filesystem not to load. Grub should go where it was told to go
and boot the OS it finds there.