On 10/27/2011 03:19 PM, Lee Parmeter wrote:
On 10/27/2011 01:50 PM, Donald E. Crowder wrote:On 10/26/2011 11:34 PM, Don Crowder wrote:The 64 bit HP I've been using with Kubuntu 11.10 is getting progressively more buggy, crashing once or twice per day so I decided to switch to a 32 bit Dell Dimension 4700. I already had Kubuntu 11.04 installed on the machine but decided to use the package manager to upgrade to 11.10. After the upgrade it wouldn't boot up nor would it boot from a regular Kubuntu 11.10 CD. This evening I downloaded the ISO for the Kubuntu Alternate CD and used it to reinstall Kubuntu 11.10. After the installation here's what happened. When I turn on the machine I see the text message inserted by my nVidia graphics card, the Dell boot screen; then, about 20 seconds later, everything blacks out and the boot sequence repeats from the nVidia text. The second time around, after the Dell boot up screen, I get a grub sceen. If I stay with the default selection... "Ubuntu with Linux 3.0.0-12 generic" ...the system reboots yet again and brings me back to the grub menu. The first time I scrolled down to the second choice on the grub screen... "Ubuntu with Linux 3.0.0-12 (recovery mode)" and, in the subsequent menu, selected... fsck: Check all file systems (will exit read-only mode) and got the following text on-screen: --- fsck from util-linux 2.19.1 [ 49.260838] Adding 1037308k swapon /dev/sda5: Priority:-1 extents:1 across:1037308k /dev/sda1: Superblock last mount time is in the future (by less than a day, probably due to the hardware clock being incorrectly set) FIXED. 1/dev/sda1 ***** REBOOT LINUX ***** /dev/sda1: 87069/9505536 blocks mountall: fsck/ [464] terminated with status 3 mountall: System must be rebooted:/ Finished, please press ENTER --- ...and it booted up just fine when I pressed enter, however, the next time I got exactly the same symptoms except I've learned that I don't actually have to do the fsck anymore so the sequence is power-om, nVidia text, Dell boot screen, crash, nVidia text, Dell boot screen, select recovery console at grub screen and, finally, select Resume Resume normal boot and it boots up just fine. My grub version is 1.99 (basically grub2) but I noticed that the grub is listed in the repository. Is there any chance that switching to the previous version of grub will fix this? I've checked the hardware clock in the bios, it's within a couple of seconds of dead on. The install always wants know if the hardware clock is set to GMT and I always tell it no. Is there some chance that setting the clock for GMT will solve this problem? [guess I should go ahead and try that - will do and get back to you if it fixed it].Setting the hardware clock to GMT made no difference. :(I suggest that you boot the machine with a LiveCD and run fsck from a root terminal session. You could use your Kubuntu standard install CD, then when up start a terminal session login as root using "sudo su". Then run fsck on all Linux partitions. For example: # fsck -fv /dev/sda1 Note: fsck is suppose to automaticly load the correct version like: fsck.ext3 or fsck.ext4. You can call the correct one directly if you know the type of Linux file system used. If you think you have more than one Linux partition, you can use "fdisk -l" to check and then run fsck on those as well.
I thought about this but, after doing some research, instead I did... #shutdown -rF now...and it made no difference but I did solve the problem. Let me give it to you chronologically because it exemplifies my love/hate relationship with Linux.
This machine wouldn't boot up from the Kubuntu 11.04 CD. After tinkering with it or a while I decided that it was a video problem so I installed a 64 MB nVidia card and that solved the problem; Kubuntu 11.04 booted and installed without a hitch.
Then the package manager asked if I wanted to upgrade to 11.10. I knew from my reading that there were very few user complaints from online upgrades so I figured "Why not?" and, of course, I learned why not because it wouldn't boot up after the upgrade.
So I downloaded the ISO file for 11.10 in order to reinstall it. The first time out, for some reason, I grabbed the 10.04 CD thinking it was 11.10 and, of course, it installed beautifully. When I discovered my error I tried again. The machine wouldn't boot from the 11.10 CD. I tried the 11.10 CD on a couple of other machines and confirmed that the CD was good.
So I downloaded the Alternate ISO file, burned a CD and reinstalled 11.10. That brings me to where I was yesterday. It just wouldn't boot up the first time, no matter what I tried.
This morning, just for grins, I removed the video card, moved the monitor to the onboard jack and tried the Kubuntu 11.10 CD again. It booted up and installed perfectly without a hitch and came back up just fine on the reboot.
Go figure. Like I said, my relationship with Linux is love/hate.Anyway, I've let it run the first update (171 files) and, because I don't like muon (the package manager in 11.10), I installed synaptic from the command line and will now use synaptic to install all my favorite apps and begin the process of tweaking it to suit myself.
I assume because it knows its replacement is in the wings, this 64 bit machine, I'm using to write this email, has been behaving itself nicely for the last couple of days but it was a great deal more stable with Debian than it has been with Kubuntu so I may just take it back to Debian if I don't use it for a fresh round of distro-hopping. :)
-- Don Crowder http://www.don-guitar.com http://twitter.com/eldergeek http://don-guitar.blogspot.com/ //www.freelists.org/list/donspatch https://plus.google.com/106370117092434105137 http://www.facebook.com/people/Don-Crowder/1321324044 A proud user of Kubuntu 11.04 (Linux) ______________________________________________________________________________ Highland Lakes Linux User Group (HLLUG): http://www.hllug.org HLLUG mailing list: //www.freelists.org/list/hllug
