Dell 1501 + Lucid + Hibernae = Brick

[sblass]

In January I bumped my Dell 1501's memory to 2 GB, added a 320 GB hard drive, and installed Kubuntu 9.10 (i386 because I had it available). After getting flaky Broadcom wireless to work with b43-fwcutter, the machine was an absolute pleasure. Not a speed demon, of course, but the best working PC I've experienced.

I upgraded an old desktop from Karmic 9.10 to Lucid 10.04 on Saturday, just to see what nightmares might be in store for upgrading the Dell 1501. Not to be disappointed, the desktop upgrade hung during online upgrade. Alternate desktop i386 install also was a failure. Frustration had me looking for another KDE-based distribution, but I decided to try the i386 desktop install once again. Miracle of miracles, it worked - although there were some wacky wireless issues.

Now to live dangerously...

I responded to the upgrade dialog box on the Dell 1501, letting it do an online upgrade to Lucid. I sat and watched the entire install, not wanting to miss the exact moment when everything went to $%@*. But surprise, surprise - it worked wonderfully. At the end of the install, it removed old extraneous S/W.

After updating my souces, I upgraded to KDE SC 4.4.3, and that too was a success. Oh, the excitement was nearly overwhelming! So I decided to hibernate the machine and watch a movie with my wife (hibernate had always worked OK for the Dell 1501 on 9.10, whereas sleep wouldn't).

Now I have a Dell 1501 brick: it's totally borked! It will not recover gracefully from hibernate. The laptop screen is just horizontal lines, a few 1-pixel or so colored vertical lines, and generally one broad (150 pixels, or so) vertical band of white. There is no grub2 file to fall back on. Powering off and restarting seems to have it come up in awake-from-hibernation fashion instead of a cold reboot.

Both the i386 and amd-64 desktop CDs produce the same (or similarly useless) displays after fully loading. I can see the language prompt and ensuing boot menu just fine, but it's totally downhill from that point on. So I can do nothing with either of those two CDs. Interestingly enough, I have no problems with a Chakra CD or the latest from PCLinuxOS (although it gives me a 1024 x 768 display, raher than the normal 1280 x 800).

Does anyone have a suggestion for recovering my sad, sad Dell 1501? Otherwise, I think this may be the final straw. I love having a big, well-intentioned organization and community standing behind my distribution of choice, but there's a limit to my masochistic Kubuntu-upgrade-nightmare tendencies.

[sblass]

Re: Dell 1501 + Lucid + Hibernae = Brick

Okay, here's an update, and this is really weird!

As I was my original post, I assumed that the laptop was booting in the 'recover-from-hibernate' fashion, and once I saw the disk access light quit flickering (even though the screen is totally borked) I assumed it was at the password entry dialog. So I entered my password, and sure enough the disk access light started flickering away. Still nothing usable on-screen, though.

Before finishing the post, the laptop screen went blank, so I pressed the shift key and there was a perfectly visible screen with login prompt. After entering, the password, everything was perfect. Screen was its usual gorgeous self (Hallstatt, Austria, on background).

So, figuring that a full shutdown would likely rectify all the problems. I did just that. NO JOY!! Everything was the same as before. Seemingly, on boot-up it's going through the 'wake-from-hibernate' process because the disk access light stops extremely quickly. I've tried the process as outlined above a couple times, but nothing is repeatable. Generally, I can't get the laptop back on-line, although at the moment it is.

However, I'm reluctant to 'restart' or 'shutdown' (and certainly not 'hibernate' or 'sleep'!!!), feeling that the problem hasn't yet been solved and the restart or shutdown won't do the trick by themselves. Truly a puzzler.

Still hoping someone has an ace up their sleeve.

[sblass]

Re: Dell 1501 + Lucid + Hibernae = Brick

Update #2: After a failed attempt at forcing a shutdown from a terminal, I powered down the system manually. When I hit the power button, it was time for a disk check and the Kubuntu splash screen came up perfectly, while the disk was scanned for errors.

Thereafter, the login came and went perfectly, arriving at the Kubuntu desktop.

Aha, now do a shutdown, and everything will probably be okay. WRONG!!! Same borked screen as before. This is painful!

[sblass]

Re: Dell 1501 + Lucid + Hibernae = Brick

Okay, this is my last update (hopefully). Still can't believe someone in the vast Kubuntu world hasn't experienced the same thing.

It turns out my Dell 1501 is not really a brick, and it is always booting up in normal fashion. Unfortunately the screen is a per-boot variation of what I described earlier. However, precisely 10 minutes after commencing the boot, the screen blanks. At that point, after pressing any key (e.g. shift), the screen comes to life perfectly at the login screen. After the login, everything is just fine.

Any ideas where the 10-minute timing loop is buried? Any implications that might give hint to a solution?

[Snowhog]

Re: Dell 1501 + Lucid + Hibernae = Brick

When you are at the Grub menu, press 'e' to edit the kernel you are going to boot with. Remove the quiet splash options and then continue to boot. This will let you see the boot messages. The last one displayed will likely be important as to identifying what's causing the hang up.