Ubuntu Booting Errors due to Wrong BOIS Settings

July 13, 2009

This weekend I tried to install Windows XP inside Ubuntu 9.04 via VirtualBox on an old computer but was troubled by a serious of GRUB booting errors. First, it was the “Grub loading stage1.5 Read error”. After tweaking the BOIS settings, I could get away with the stage1.5 error but was plagued with other disk reading errors.

Initially I thought it was the 100GB hard disk as I did not have any problem when I changed to another HD (8 GB) and installed Ubuntu and VirtualBox. After googling the internet for solutions, I found that I could solve the problem without taking the hard route of BOIS upgrading, which was recommended by most people. This was what I did and it is pretty simple:

I got into the BOIS settings during a cold boot and simply load the default settings and made the following tweaks for the hard disk settings:

• PIO Mode: manually set to the mode which is detected and displayed in BOIS
• DMA Mode: manually set to MWDMA2 as implied by what was detected
• S.M.A.R.T: [Disabled]
• 32Bit Data Transfer: [Disabled]

Another factor that might add to the problem was that I tried initially to create a home partition and made /home as the mounting point on it when Ubuntu starts. Because of the disk problems, I ended it up forsaking this approach and install Ubuntu the normal way – taking over the entire hard disk so that Ubuntu is running on one partition.

Lastly, to make sure the Ubuntu Live CD was created properly from the .ISO image file downloaded, I chose to use the LOWEST speed, rather than the default maximum speed, to burn it onto a DVD disc.

That’s it! Hope this helps those who have the similar problems and who do not want to go through the pain of upgrading BOIS

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