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Location: Utah, United States

Born in Kapiolani Children's Medical Center, just a few blocks from Waikiki. Graduated from Kahuku High School. Rode BMX Freestyle for most of my life (more than 20 years), now my 8 year old son is ripping up the skate parks, but plans on getting drafted by the SeaHawks as a WR.

Monday, October 13, 2008

Grub Stage 1.5 … Grub Loading, Please Wait … Error 18

I got a used DELL from work a couple years ago, they sold it cheap because they were upgrading all their computers, and I used it to play movies for my kids while I was at their mom's house. I decided to take it back home and put Linux on it and let them use that to play online while I was on my regular computer. I had Ubuntu installed on a HDD in my regular tower and swapped out the drives and it didn't work so I decided to wipe the HDD and reinstall Ubuntu. The install went smooth and it ejected the CD and said hit Enter. I hit enter and the computer rebooted and said:

Grub Stage 1.5

Grub Loading, Please Wait
Error 18

I waited for a while and nothing happened. I rebooted again, and again saw the same message, thinking I might have rebooted too soon before I waited a long time, took a nap for a few hours and came back, it was still in the same state. I read all I could about this error message that seems to only happen to newbies, where the only fix seems to be re-installing the GRUB, but, this is a NEW install... I reinstalled the whole Ubuntu again, nothing. Tried making a separate partition, said the partition was too small, so I redid it from scratch again, nope. A lot of people were getting results from doing something in the BIOS, my BIOS had nothing close to what they were changing to fix their problem. I was thinking maybe the HDD I had was too big for the motherboard, so I took it out and looked, it was a 30gig made in 2000 and the original was a 80gig made in 2003. I was thinking I was going to have to wipe the original HDD and put Ubuntu on that but there was no guarantee it would work. Then I got an idea, switch the pins in the HDD from "Cable Select" to "15 Cylinder Master" (there was a choice for 16 Cylinder but the Error 18 seemed to be saying the BIOS was expecting a lower number) guess what, the DELL booted as if Ubuntu was native to the system!

I posted this hoping it might help someone somewhere who tried all the other suggestions and still couldn't get their system working.

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