Gparted is Junk, Booting Goes Clunk, The Cat Sees My Funk

[SecretCode]

That's a dignified cat

[SteveRiley]

Except when he gets in his rambunctious mood. He'll growl and charge all over the second floor, bouncing off furniture and walls. It's hilarious, and happens every day around 7:00 PM.

[SecretCode]

7pm; hmm. *puts on deerstalker hat* What time is he normally fed?

[vinnywright]

Sniff,,,Sniff,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,, theirs a cat around hear somewhere .





VINNY

[SteveRiley]

7pm; hmm. *puts on deerstalker hat* What time is he normally fed?

Dry food in the morning (6:00 AM), wet food in the evening (6:00 PM). And that morning feeding is like some kind of religious ritual -- it never changes. Damn cats won't let us sleep in on weekends!

[SteveRiley]

I know what you were thinking, but the study doesn't say it scales (with more than one cat)

But it also doesn't say it doesn't!

[Tom_ZeCat]

Help! I'm still having major hassles with this. When I restart my Lenovo (boos and hisses from the crowd), it hangs on the Lenovo screen. Every. Bleepin'. Time. If I hit F2, it says, “please wait.” Sometimes it sticks there with the Lenovo logo still there. Other times it sends me into the … not the BIOS menu; I guess they call it the UEFI menu now? If I go in there and then save it with F10, then I'll exit and finally get the Grub menu to choose Kubuntu or Windows 7. There are still two listings for “Ubuntu,” both of which are at the top now. I don't care if the word says “Ubuntu” or “Kubuntu.” I just want it to work. Once I'm at this point it works mostly. Gparted is still giving me the same crap as earlier described.

For a while I could restart this thing and the Grub menu would always come up. Not anymore. Now I have to keep restarting over and over, hitting F2 until I can finally access UEFI and save the boot order. It's exasperating. Out of curiosity, I pulled the lower listing of “Ubuntu” to the top of the menu and that really screwed things up. After I did that, numerous things would not work. LibreOffice complained that my Tom's Default.ott file was corrupted or missing. VirtualBox would not run and gave me this error message:

Failed to create the VirtualBox COM object.

The application will now terminate.

Callee RC: NS_ERROR_FACTORY_NOT_REGISTERED (0x80040154)

I changed it back to the other Ubuntu being on top, and VirtualBox was back working, and LibreOffice was fine. Gparted is still screwed up. Okular also won't print my PDF files. It printed the first four pages of a document and then pooped out on me. It won't print them now no matter what I do, nor will other PDF programs on my computer. LibreOffice appears to print regular documents just fine though.

I ran sudo efibootmgr -v and this is what I got:

[sudo] password for tommy: 
BootCurrent: 0006
Timeout: 1 seconds
BootOrder: 0006,0006,0008,0005,0002,0004,0003,0007
Boot0000  Setup FvFile(721c8b66-426c-4e86-8e99-3457c46ab0b9)
Boot0001  Boot Menu     FvFile(86488440-41bb-42c7-93ac-450fbf7766bf)
Boot0002* USB FDD:      VenMsg(bc7838d2-0f82-4d60-8316-c068ee79d25b,6ff015a28830b543a8b8641009461e49)
Boot0003* ATA HDD: WDC WD7500BPVT-24HXZT3                       ACPI(a0341d0,0)PCI(1f,2)SATA(0,0,0)..bYVD.A...O.*..
Boot0004* ATAPI CD: TSSTcorp CDDVDW TS-L633F                    ACPI(a0341d0,0)PCI(1f,2)SATA(4,0,0)......!N.:^G.V.T
Boot0005* USB HDD:      VenMsg(bc7838d2-0f82-4d60-8316-c068ee79d25b,33e821aaaf33bc4789bd419f88c50803)
Boot0006* ubuntu        HD(1,800,32000,8a42dad2-4d4a-4d8d-99d8-e489f3a02533)File(\EFI\ubuntu\shimx64.efi)
Boot0007* PCI LAN: Realtek PXE B03 D00  BIOS(6,0,5265616c74656b20505845204230332044303000)............................................................................A.....................
Boot0008* Windows Boot Manager  HD(1,800,32000,8a42dad2-4d4a-4d8d-99d8-e489f3a02533)File(\EFI\Microsoft\Boot\bootmgfw.efi)WINDOWS.........x...B.C.D.O.B.J.E.C.T.=.{.9.d.e.a.8.6.2.c.-.5.c.d.d.-.4.e.7.0.-.a.c.c.1.-.f.3.2.b.3.4.4.d.4.7.9.5.}....................
tommy@tommy-Ideapad-Z570:~$

These problems started after I wiped my entire drive with Geparted Live (on a thumb drive) and started from scratch, installing Windows 7 and Kubuntu as a dual boot, and Windows 7 again under VirtualBox. Lenovo has a quirky UEFI. When I originally installed Kubuntu, I kept the Windows 7 that came with it, and set up a partition for Kubuntu, putting it there. I had to jump through all kinds of hoops to get Grub to list the options of Kubuntu and Windows 7. Eventually it worked.

This time around, I wiped my drive completely, installing a factory (non-Lenovo) copy of Windows 7. For wiping the drive, as I said, I used Gparted Live per Kubuntu recommendations I found on the Internet. Here's what my drive looks like in KDE Partition Editor:


screengrab

With how my Lenovo keeps hanging on the splash screen, is that evidence that my hard drive is getting close to failure? Or is it something I've messed up in the setup? Should I consider using the rEFInd Bootmanager utility? Could it straighten out some of these problems.

This has been an exercise in frustration today. I'm not getting my work done. I printed up my PDFs that I need for work in Windows 7 on my little Asus netbook.

The other solution I've considered is taking it to the shooting range and fixing it with a Romanian-made AK-47, and then swinging by my neighborhood pawn shop to buy something else.

[SecretCode]

I always think of hardware errors in situations like this. And then I always think that's too easy a cop-out.

But if you can get to GRUB, run memtest. And/or if you can boot from a USB device, run fsck on the internal drive.

[Tom_ZeCat]

I took your advice. I booted from a Kubuntu thumb drive and ran fsck. I didn't find any errors on any of the disks or partitions thereof. However, here's an interesting development. I have both Ubuntus listed at the top of the boot order in my EUFI still. Now I've tried unplugging both my Logitech G930 headset (from the USB port) and both my USB hubs. If I do that, the laptop doesn't hang on the splash screen. I get "booting in insecure mode" and then the Grub menu offering Ubuntu or Windows 7 comes up. I've tested it a few times and it works. I don't know why one of those devices would cause it to hang, but I guess I can live with unplugging them when I restart and then plugging them back in. You would think that the laptop would not attempt to boot to either of those since Ubuntu is my first listing in the boot order. But, whatever, this seems to have fixed the problem.

My USB hub setup is a little weird. I have two 4-port round hubs that I've installed directly into my desk. However, I plug those into a USB hub under my desk, which in turn plugs into one USB port on my laptop. I do it this way so that I only use one USB port and it's simpler to plug in. Both of my desk-based hubs are powered, and USB devices seem to run in them just fine. Maybe somehow this setup causes the laptop to hang on the splash screen. Or maybe somehow it's the G930 headset. Anyway, I'll just unplug them on reboot.

[SecretCode]

My laptop spends quite a long time checking USB devices, if any are plugged in, before presenting the boot menu (or going directly to grub).

[SteveRiley]

With UEFI, wiping drives isn't enough. You also need to remove the NVRAM variables that point to now-nonexistent boot loaders.

[Tom_ZeCat]

With UEFI, wiping drives isn't enough. You also need to remove the NVRAM variables that point to now-nonexistent boot loaders.

Good to know. Thanks for the info, Steve. I'm googling how to do that now, though my laptop does boot up fine at this point as long as I start it up with my USB hub unplugged and then plug it in after whichever OS I've chosen has started loading.

I keep wondering if I'll ever end up using that REFIND utility that you so highly recommended. Would that be a tool for this?

[SteveRiley]

I keep wondering if I'll ever end up using that REFIND utility that you so highly recommended. Would that be a tool for this?

rEFInd: http://www.rodsbooks.com/refind/

Best boot manager ever. No need for that complex and confounding beast known as GRUB.