Wont boot from external hard disk

[dibl]

Re: Wont boot from external hard disk

Booting Kubuntu 10.10 should not be slow -- it should be scary fast. Matter of fact, the developers have pushed fast booting so hard that in some cases I suspect it's causing other problems.

If you're interesting in improving that situation, I'm pretty confident that by removing the splash option, and or reviewing the dmesg contents, it should not be terribly difficult to learn where in the boot sequence the holdup is. It may relate to issues "seeing" through the USB bus -- the USB connection is not as fast as a PATA or SATA bus, and may well have some special needs for normal booting. Just guessing, of course -- we'd have to see the boot messages to get a better idea.

[broadstairs]

Re: Wont boot from external hard disk

Well since I did the 56 updates it has improved somewhat. Next time I boot it I'll take a look at the messages.

Right now I am bugged by a problem I had before when I tried a Ubuntu flavour - hardware config. I am unable to set my screen size to 1280x1024 at 24bpp which I know both monitor and card support. However I can find no easy way to re-configure the graphics card, Oh for the MCC (Mandriva Control Centre :-X ).

How on earth am I supposed to change the graphics card config in this thing?

Stuart

[dibl]

Re: Wont boot from external hard disk

That Radeon X800 is not anything I can help with -- I stick with Nvidia GPUs (or Intel for the netbooks). I would advise you to make a study of how to work with the Radeon GPUs on Ubuntu Forum, which has a lot more activity (as well as useless junk) than this forum. Once the right driver and parameters are set to run X, I don't think there's a difference with KDE vs. Gname desktops.

You probably would be wise to review the release notes: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/MaverickMeerkat/ReleaseNotes

I didn't see anything obvious, but I don't remember all your hardware.

[broadstairs]

Re: Wont boot from external hard disk

I just wish someone could tell me if there is a command I can run to configure X and set the graphics card parms. That's what so flipping frustrating about Kubuntu and makes me want to forget the whole thing. Why cant I just run a config command and set the correct parms?

Stuart

[skunk]

Re: Wont boot from external hard disk

Complain to ATI. As soon as they open source their driver it should work as effortlessly as it does with Intel.

[broadstairs]

Re: Wont boot from external hard disk

I dont think that is the point, every other distro I have tried allows manual configuration easily and my card and monitor work quite well with Open Source drivers, they obviously dont auto configure on Ubuntu for some reason or other. I hate to keep on about Mandriva but the card configured correctly and allowed me to set the monitor values (screen size & refresh rate etc) to get it working as I wished. Ubuntu will not configure the card correctly so I cannot get what I want out of the monitor (or the sizes and rates it supports).

I think that is down to Ubuntu, not the fact that ATI have closed source drivers.

Stuart

[Qqmike]

Re: Wont boot from external hard disk

Not related to GRUB 2? What's the status of this bug, many duplicates thereof:
Current grub-pc takes several minutes to show menu
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+s...b2/+bug/420933
off again, on again ... ?

[dibl]

Re: Wont boot from external hard disk

I just wish someone could tell me if there is a command I can run to configure X and set the graphics card parms.

Well! We've come all the way from "won't boot" to "no automatic X configuration"!

I'd call that "progress".

I'm sure somewhere there's a Radeon guru who can advise on that GPU. When you searched on "Radeon X800" on Ubuntu Forums, about how many threads did you find? 100? 250?

[broadstairs]

Re: Wont boot from external hard disk

Yes it is progress of a sort! When it boots it takes about a minute before I see any activity on the display, it stays black with no cursor or mouse pointer, and this may be why I thought it was not booting. Once the Kubuntu screen appears it takes about another minute or so to complete the start up.

The main issue I had before when I tried Kubuntu and one of the main reasons why I gave up on it (after stability and crashes) was that there is no facility to do any hardware setup like there is on most other distros - X being the main one. Lets face it a lot of folks who think they might try Linux will be unlikely to have the very latest and greatest hardware. One reason they do it is because it is so much less of a resource hog than other OSs andX is likely to be the one thing which needs tweaking.

I thought one of the main raison d'etre for Ubuntu in all its flavours was ease of use but if it cannot correctly handle the hardware it fails on that count if you cannot manually adjust it.

Stuart

Edit: I have just acquired a HD4350 gfx card and when it arrives I'll try again to see if this can be made to auto configure. Having spent some time in the Ubuntu forums looks like an X800 is never going to work even with 10.04. Bad move since it can be made to work well in other distros. Ubuntu is making a mistake going the route it has and not having manual config for X.

[dibl]

Re: Wont boot from external hard disk

an X800 is never going to work even with 10.04. Bad move since it can be made to work well in other distros. Ubuntu is making a mistake going the route it has and not having manual config for X.

With most of the world moving to laptops and netbooks, and considering all the new hardware that must be constantly added to the "supported devices" list, I can't imagine that putting scarce resources to work on a Radeon X800 "configurator" would be a smart business move by Canonical. However, opinions are cheap are plentiful.

[vinnywright]

Re: Wont boot from external hard disk

if I'm not mistaken YOU can still use a manual xorg.conf ......and it will be used and read first.

BUT you must come up with a good one........for example say you boot a cd that uses one and set it right for your card then copey it off and place it in it's place.

it may work just fine hear....

but that may have changed as well.....so I could be rong...but I dont think so

VINNY

[broadstairs]

Re: Wont boot from external hard disk

With most of the world moving to laptops and netbooks, and considering all the new hardware that must be constantly added to the "supported devices" list, I can't imagine that putting scarce resources to work on a Radeon X800 "configurator" would be a smart business move by Canonical. However, opinions are cheap are plentiful.

I agree that putting resources in to old cards is not a good idea but I do believe having the ability to manually create an X config using the available commands which already exist in other versions of Linux would be a good idea. Its fine to try the auto config route and if it works that's great. The problem comes when using a card which wont configure correctly and there is no way to try to do a config without hand cranking it in an editor is a bad idea. In my view it would be a better route to go down to have some kind of configurator which runs at install time and builds an xorg.conf file, at least then you have a starting point to mess with if needs be.

My other point is that since my card does configure OK in other distros install then it should do the same here. Plus my monitor is not configured correctly and again since the inly way to correct that is an xorg.conf then again having one to start with would be much better.

Stuart

[broadstairs]

Re: Wont boot from external hard disk

Well the new gfx card works well but I still have a black screen after hitting enter on the grub screen and before the blue screen with Kubuntu and white dots on it appear. The blank screen stays on for 30+ seconds, it has speeded up in boting up a bit overall but it does not look good as you have no idea if its booting or not for what seems a long time.

I just wonder if this is a bug because I'm using an external USB hard drive. I have tried installing under VirtualBox and the black screen goes away quicky.

Stuart

[dibl]

Re: Wont boot from external hard disk

I just wonder if this is a bug because I'm using an external USB hard drive.

It probably is due to booting from the USB drive, but I'm not sure that qualifies it as a "bug". The USB channel is way slower than a SATA channel. The *buntu boot process has been heavily developed in the last year to be really fast -- it's probably being constrained by the USB interface.

You could test this, if you have a spare internal hard drive to hook up temporarily. Even an old IDE drive will probably boot faster than the USB drive.

[broadstairs]

Re: Wont boot from external hard disk

Well having said it was working with the new gfx card I now have a problem caused by this auto configure and the proprietary fglrx drivers. My monitor does not provide valid info when probed and because of this if I boot normally it attempts to use sync values for my monitor which dont work and I get a blank screen.

I have copied a working xorg.conf from another system which uses the new fglrx drviers and has valid monitor information. Now when I boot this it does start up and the splash screen with all the icons like disk wrench and the KDE icon shows fine however instead of seeing the KDE desktop I get a black screen, it is the correct size and frequency as I can see this using the menu on the monitor, if I ctl-alt-del it comes up with the 3 options for logout etc and I can see that and if I select say logout then it will logout and I can see the login screen. So how do I get the KDE session to show rather than a black screen.

Stuart