I had a hard drive go south and am trying to install Debian 6.0.5 on the replacement (a spare drive that had only an extended partition with a logical EXT4 partition). I am getting MBR 1 ERROR when trying to boot from any install or live CD I have (Debian, Windows, Ubuntu, UltBootCD, etc.). The strange thing is that I can boot from Spinrite 6 and a couple of other utility CD's I have. The system has no floppy drive and cannot boot from a USB drive so those options are out. Does anyone have a suggestion or solution for this problem? Thanks for your time Doug
Can you tell is it the CD/DVD drive that is bad or is it the hard drive/ partition.. I would reformat the spare drive and start fresh, Linux should make it own partitions..
I doubt it's the optical drive as it was the one in the system and a replacement CD drive is giving the same error. Any of the working utilities does not give me the option to format the drive. My other system is SATA only but I'm going to see if I can borrow a USB enclosure and see if that helps me clear off that drive. Remember, none of my install media allow me to boot and I'm wondering if having no primary partition (or space to install one) available on the hard drive is the problem. Thanks for the reply and I'll keep you posted. Doug
Well... a clean hard drive has removed the MBR 1 ERROR problem, but still no luck with getting an optical drive to boot. Three different optical drives, secondary master and slave (I'm sure I even tried primary slave), different cables. grrrr! lol
I did that before I even started all this (I was A+ certified in 1990 which is why this is so freaking annoying... ) . I'm going to leave it for a couple of days and see what hardware deals are on. Maybe it's time to upgrade a tired old server to a quad-core, 16 G of RAM, an SSD system drive and a mirrored pair of SATA 3 T data drives. I can boot/install from a USB stick then too. Thanks again.
