This is rich - Upgrade/Install boot madness
Howdy,
Let me run this by you - weird stuff.
I was more or less hapilly running 11.10 (well, running anyway) when 12.04 came along so I created myself a life USB stick with some space for persistent storage and booted from that. Looked okay-ish so decided to upgrade. Ran the upgrade as offered by the 11.10 system after booting from that again.
Of course somewhere down the upgrade my system decided to crash on me (or so I thought) - it does this every 20 hours orso - flips a bit somewhere and crashes/reboots, usually while I'm hitting the keyboard (mechanical/contact issue?).
Naturally, when rebooting, the system was dead as can be. BIOS splash - clear screen - black with blinking cursor on top left forever. No HDD activity either. Seems to stop in its tracks right after the boot sector or in grub or something.
I didn't have extra disk space available to backup the nearly 500 GiB orso of user data (no I'm not a downloader - that is mostly my photos
) so I ran the life system off the USB stick for some two month or so - put my favourite apps on it and worked with that - a tad slow/limited, but hey.
Yesterday I got myself another USB HDD, swapped the new one into the laptop and the old one into the USB drive case and installed from the life USB stick - right from the boot menu or the one after that (not from the booted system).
Next I try to reboot. Same black screen as before with the crashed upgrade. No HDD activity. Crashes right there in the first boot stages.
Next I try to reboot from the USB stick again - and here it is - the weirdness :
I tell the BIOS to boot from the USB stick - doesn't matter if via Setup or via the Boot Selection Menu (F12)
Next thing I know, the system boots from the hard disk and succesfully so (!)
The system comes up cleanly with the freshly installed 12.04 on HDD
Weirdness:
There is no screen IO to indicate that the system on the USB is booting
- No initial boot menu (Run Kubuntu, Check Disk, Test Memory)
- No Kubuntu Install/Try selection menu
nada - it just boots the system from HDD - I couldn't even run the life system from USB anymore if I wanted to (!!)
Without the USB stick the system just hangs on bootstrapping
With the USB stick the system boots cleanly from HDD when it should boot from USB
How's that for weird?
Due to a fair batch of other issues I'm really about done fiddling with this stuff and can't be bothered to spend another night or so searching, testing, hacking bootscripts or whatever and rebooting. About to install something else, maybe give SuSe or some such a try...
Any last pointers for a quick and easy fix ?
System: Fujitsu-Siemens Amilo Li-1718 (Core Duo T2350@1.86GHz), 2GB. 500 GB HDD (Toshiba this one) with 40 GiB at beginning of disk for Windoze, rest freed for Kubuntu during install.
Let me run this by you - weird stuff.
I was more or less hapilly running 11.10 (well, running anyway) when 12.04 came along so I created myself a life USB stick with some space for persistent storage and booted from that. Looked okay-ish so decided to upgrade. Ran the upgrade as offered by the 11.10 system after booting from that again.
Of course somewhere down the upgrade my system decided to crash on me (or so I thought) - it does this every 20 hours orso - flips a bit somewhere and crashes/reboots, usually while I'm hitting the keyboard (mechanical/contact issue?).
Naturally, when rebooting, the system was dead as can be. BIOS splash - clear screen - black with blinking cursor on top left forever. No HDD activity either. Seems to stop in its tracks right after the boot sector or in grub or something.
I didn't have extra disk space available to backup the nearly 500 GiB orso of user data (no I'm not a downloader - that is mostly my photos
) so I ran the life system off the USB stick for some two month or so - put my favourite apps on it and worked with that - a tad slow/limited, but hey.Yesterday I got myself another USB HDD, swapped the new one into the laptop and the old one into the USB drive case and installed from the life USB stick - right from the boot menu or the one after that (not from the booted system).
Next I try to reboot. Same black screen as before with the crashed upgrade. No HDD activity. Crashes right there in the first boot stages.
Next I try to reboot from the USB stick again - and here it is - the weirdness :
I tell the BIOS to boot from the USB stick - doesn't matter if via Setup or via the Boot Selection Menu (F12)
Next thing I know, the system boots from the hard disk and succesfully so (!)
The system comes up cleanly with the freshly installed 12.04 on HDD
Weirdness:
There is no screen IO to indicate that the system on the USB is booting
- No initial boot menu (Run Kubuntu, Check Disk, Test Memory)
- No Kubuntu Install/Try selection menu
nada - it just boots the system from HDD - I couldn't even run the life system from USB anymore if I wanted to (!!)
Without the USB stick the system just hangs on bootstrapping
With the USB stick the system boots cleanly from HDD when it should boot from USB
How's that for weird?
Due to a fair batch of other issues I'm really about done fiddling with this stuff and can't be bothered to spend another night or so searching, testing, hacking bootscripts or whatever and rebooting. About to install something else, maybe give SuSe or some such a try...
Any last pointers for a quick and easy fix ?
System: Fujitsu-Siemens Amilo Li-1718 (Core Duo T2350@1.86GHz), 2GB. 500 GB HDD (Toshiba this one) with 40 GiB at beginning of disk for Windoze, rest freed for Kubuntu during install.
It was bound to be something simple, but I was just too fed up to tinker with it - sorry 'bout that. Probably means that the life system on the stick is shot (or at least the booting of it) but I guess I can always build me a new one (and install favourite apps again and all that jazz). But will be setting up the HDD first now and give the new Kubuntu another try.
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