Kubuntu 17.04 on a thumbdrive hangs on boot attempt

[woodsmoke]

I hate to say it.

Reinstall and immediately go to settings / Desktop session login and logout / desktop session / start with empty session.

restart.

go get a beverage of your choice

I personally never restore a session when I'm running on a usb.

usb has... well...problems...

WAAAAAAAYYYYYYY DOWN IN THE GUTS OF ALL OS's is searching for a whirling disk.

woodsmoke

[Qqmike]

none of the Kubuntu ISO's I have going back to 15.10 have a "vmlinuz" in casper ,,,just the "vmlinuz.efi" ,,,,,,,but all my neon ones do ,,,,,,I must have opened one of them thinking it was the Kubuntu-17.04

Ah, so there ya go. Stranger things HAVE happened around here, though ... Now we know more than we ever dreamed of knowing about this!

Of course, the OPs issue remains ...

[rwbehne1]

Ok, I've redownloaded a new ISO, carefully checked the sha256sum, completely formatted the darn USB drive 3 more times, installing a new FAT32 and setting the boot flag, then reinstalled the ISO with dd if=/kubuntu-17.04-desktop-amd64.iso of=/dev/sdd bs=16M each time then tried to boot after each session. No joy.

Now, instead of the black screen and a blinking underbar, I get a screenfull of kernel panic.

I tried to upload a picture of the error messages on my screen, but my tablet won't upload it.

[Qqmike]

Is your computer "newer," like > 2010?
If so, just for the heck of it, did you try the suggestion in Post #5 above?

[rwbehne1]

Is your computer "newer," like > 2010?
If so, just for the heck of it, did you try the suggestion in Post #5 above?

I just tried, but no joy.

[rwbehne1]

Here's what happens now.

[GreyGeek]

In scanning previous posts I do not see the make and model of your computer?

[rwbehne1]

In scanning previous posts I do not see the make and model of your computer?

That's because I put that sort of stuff in the "PC Specs" on my profile so I don't have to retype it into each thread. If a certain piece of info about my system is missing, just tell me how to find it and I'll be happy to add it there.

[GreyGeek]

That's because I put that sort of stuff in the "PC Specs" on my profile so I don't have to retype it into each thread. If a certain piece of info about my system is missing, just tell me how to find it and I'll be happy to add it there.

amateur gynecology?
I hope you are not serious!

You need a model number, the GPU, the Eth and wifi models, etc.
IF you can get to a terminal issue one or more of the following as root:
lspci
lshw
inxi -@ 14 (will give you EVERYTHING in several text files. Search the relevant ones for missing info. Consult "man inxi" for all the possible switches.)

[rwbehne1]

My first two thoughts:
1) Did you verify the checksum for the ISO *AND* for the burned USB stick.

I have been checking the downloaded files, because it's very possible to have errors that way. But I neglected to do the USB itself, I didn't even think you could do that.

From the http://kubuntu.com/alternative-downloads page:
kubuntu-17.04-desktop-amd64.iso – e702ac36901679c71d42ebf0aab9e5dff520121a7cb1eac02c 91e2db53df7e9d

# sha256sum /kubuntu-17.04-desktop-amd64.iso
e702ac36901679c71d42ebf0aab9e5dff520121a7cb1eac02c 91e2db53df7e9d /kubuntu-17.04-desktop-amd64.iso

# sha256sum /dev/sdc
227963ffaea5a7459e0ca63601625e88216663f45efaf37388 fd9eabea200fbf /dev/sdc

Was that done right? If so, then something is wrong with the install to the USB. Either that or I didn't verify the checksum correctly.

[GreyGeek]

That won't work. Installed on the USB stick, you don't have an ISO anymore to compare the original iso's md5 sum to.

https://askubuntu.com/questions/547332/can-an-integrity-check-be-run-against-a-usb-boot-disk

"If you want to check the integrity of each of the individuals files, then you need to boot from the USB and then select check cd for defects from the boot menu. There's a file ms5sum.txt in each ubuntu iso which contains the md5sum of each individual file in the iso. The check cd for defects option verifies the md5sum of each file with the md5 list present in the iso."

The "Check CD for Defects" will return an error msg if its check sum for each file doesn't agree with the stored values.

[rwbehne1]

That won't work. Installed on the USB stick, you don't have an ISO anymore to compare the original iso's md5 sum to.

https://askubuntu.com/questions/547332/can-an-integrity-check-be-run-against-a-usb-boot-disk

"If you want to check the integrity of each of the individuals files, then you need to boot from the USB and then select check cd for defects from the boot menu. There's a file ms5sum.txt in each ubuntu iso which contains the md5sum of each individual file in the iso. The check cd for defects option verifies the md5sum of each file with the md5 list present in the iso."

The "Check CD for Defects" will return an error msg if its check sum for each file doesn't agree with the stored values.

So in other words, in order to check a USB that refuses to boot, I first have to boot the non-bootable USB to check it.

Right!

[rwbehne1]

After reading through the link, I found the relevant part which you didn't mention:

...just navigating into the usb drive and running md5sum -c md5sum.txt should perform a consistency check of the individual files.

So I did that and the result was:

/casper/initrd.lz: FAILED

Question: Can I simply mount the iso file, and copy just that one file over and repeat the test?

[rwbehne1]

I keep reinstalling the ISO, (5 more times so far,) then running md5sum -c md5sum.txt which results in:

[B]/casper/initrd.lz:[/B] [COLOR=#ff0000]FAILED[/COLOR]

every time.

This now has me thinking that the USB itself has gone bad. The error is always in the same file, thus the same space on the drive. I have mounted the ISO file, then ran the same test there, and it passes with no problem.

1) What's the best way to acid test the USB drive memory so I can verify this hypothesis?
2) Is there a way to recover this USB drive, perhaps by blocking out that part of the memory?

[GreyGeek]

My bad. I thought you were getting to the Grub menu and were having problems afterward.

Your suspecions may be right. USB sticks usually don't have S.M.A.R.T facilities so one way to check them is in a terminal with the badblocks command.

https://askubuntu.com/questions/5391...or-flash-drive

sudo badblocks -b 4096 -c 4096 -s /dev/sdX

"This operation can take a lot of time, especially if the storage drive actually is damaged. If the error count rises above zero, we'll know that there's a bad block. We can safely abort the operation at any moment (even forcefully like during a power failure), if we're not interested in the exact amount (and maybe location) of bad blocks. It's possible to abort automatically on error with the option -e 1."