A little Ubuntu Incident

First, my situation: I own an XP box, hand assembled and recently upgraded (so that I could play Oblivion).

Vista was dualbooted with XP and everything works like a charm. When I installed Ubuntu though, it was start of my nightmare. The installlation proceeded beautifully, and it was smart enough to detect prior Windows installation. =)

Once it booted into GRUB though, this was what I saw:

Error 21: Selected Disk Does Not Exist

!!!???!!!

Enough said, I literally googled and read every single relevant page on this issue. I read through menu.lst and browsed through my grub folders. I installed and reinstalled on different harddisk and partitions (I have 2 hdds and several partitions - imagine the permutations) I have no idea why it refused to acknowledge the existence of my 2 hdds that are sitting comfortably in my casing, though Windows have no problem finding them.

In the end, I gave up and I took out my 256mb thumbdrive. 'Let's see if you can detect this,' I thought. And so I installed my Ubuntu's /boot in this thumbdrive, that jutted out of my casing and looking absolutely like it did not belong at all.

And guess what, that solved the problem beautifully. I was ultra relieved and mentally kicked myself for having to resort to this 'cheapskate' method. Well, at least it worked. I have no idea, even now, why ubuntu did not detect my hdds. So now I am still booting up my ubuntu via thumbdrive, and there is no cause of concern except the slightly more bootup time required. But that is not an issue. I still love my Ubuntu =)