Unable to boot after fresh install

[huntercc]

Hello all.

I am trying to repurpose an old decommissioned device that I rescued from work - it was headed for the dumpster. It is a Simatic IPC227D (https://mall.industry.siemens.com/ma...ducts/10093476). After following this link, just click on "Product Information" to see technical details. My specific device has an Intel Atom E660 1.3 GHz with 2 GB RAM and 80 GB hard drive. It came with Windows 7 Ultimate. As far as I can tell it only supports 32-bit, not 64-bit.

This device was working perfectly and was booting just fine into Windows when I got it. I cloned the drive before I did anything to it. I am able to boot into a Live USB (kubuntu 18, 32-bit), and everything appears to work just fine. Installation to the HD goes very smooth. But after I reboot, I'm greeted with a blank screen... specifically, my monitor says "no video signal". It goes through the initial power-on screens, detects the HD etc, but where I would expect to see GRUB it drops the video and I get nothing after that.

This has happened with every flavor of linux I have tried (peppermint, centos, debian, ubuntu). I made sure I only tried the 32-bit version of each. I am at a complete loss as to how to solve this... any ideas out there?

[jglen490]

That's a video problem and without info on the video chip, it would be hard to find a driver. However, in Live mode you get a display, so it's probably not entirely strange.

In Live mode, the video works well enough to display on a screen. So, in Live mode, open a terminal and enter

sudo lshw -c display

and see what it says for the video chip/processor/card.

[huntercc]

Here's the result:

kubuntu@kubuntu:~$ sudo lshw -c display
 *-display                 
      description: VGA compatible controller
      product: Atom Processor E6xx Integrated Graphics Controller
      vendor: Intel Corporation
      physical id: 2
      bus info: pci@0000:00:02.0
      version: 05
      width: 32 bits
      clock: 33MHz
      capabilities: pm msi vga_controller bus_master cap_list rom
      configuration: driver=gma500 latency=0
      resources: irq:40 memory:a8000000-a80fffff ioport:9008(size=8) memory:90000000-9fffffff memory:a81c0000-a81fffff memory:c0000-dffff

[jglen490]

If you can open a terminal, you may be able to get a gma500 video driver using the info here.

This would involve setting up the PPA unique to Bionic, then using apt to update the sources, and possibly install the video driver.

[huntercc]

And this can be done from the live usb, to update the hard drive install?

[jglen490]

Personally, I've never done that, but it should be doable. It would involve chroot, and other magic, but I don't have the steps down on the process.

[huntercc]

I spent some time on this last night. Turns out the best available driver for the gma500 is already in the linux kernel. Problem is, this particular hardware has zero linux support from the original vendor; what drivers have been produced were patched together over time, and are hardly perfect.

That said, I still don't understand why it runs just fine from Live USB but gives me zero video signal when I boot from the HD. I know the system is running - I can see activity in the syslog when I boot from Live USB and read the hard drive.

I welcome any additional suggestions on how to get something working here!

[jglen490]

I'm no "Live"/installer expert, but it seems that the installer OS is much more generalized than a full install. I can't say where the installer devs got their gm500 driver, but I believe it just exists there. The installer does not put its own operating environment into the PC's installed operating environment, instead it brings in the packages defined for the PC environment's installation and runs apt/dpkg scripts. That's why the Live environment and installed OS ARE different.

What I was thinking is if you can open a terminal in the installed environment, you could run

sudo apt update && sudo apt install gma500_gfx

and try to install the gma500_gfx module. I am not 100% certain that the driver's current, correct name is that, but Google brings that back with regularity. Even without a GUI, you should be able to open a terminal.

[huntercc]

When I boot from the HD, I am completely blind. Monitor says no signal, so I can't tell what is happening. Shouldn't I at least see the grub menu on bootup?

I did find a forum post on another forum from a couple of years ago that described a process of booting into the Live USB and using chroot and apt to install packages onto the hard drive - but I was not able to find the gma500 module. Google brought me to another page that claims the gma500 driver is incorporated into the linux kernel.

The link you provided above for EMGD was apparently intended to be an improved version of the gma500 driver, but the author stopped updating it after ubuntu 16.04.

Regarding gma500_gfx, when I view the syslog on the HD I see this line scattered throughout:

[drm:oaktrail_crtc_mode_set [gma500_gfx]] *ERROR* Failed to find proper PLL settings

I don't know what that means exactly, but does that imply I'm already using the gma500 driver?

[jglen490]

It looks like it's at least trying. I've tried looking up PLL settings, and the results are some old and pretty esoteric low-level coding discussions that I am absolutely not comfortable with. Phase-Lock Loop (PLL) has to do with how the kernel sets timing at the hardware level. By timing, it's much finer than "2:00 PM on a Saturday afternoon". There was talk of micro-second adjustments, etc. I don't know if there is a utility that can help out with such things.

As for showing Grub output, you might be able to see that by repeatedly hitting the ESC key as the machine starts up. It might give you the opportunity to select and edit a boot line, so you could experiment with boot parameters (i.e., nomodeset, etc.). It might take awhile, and you'll want to research some of the boot parameters having to do with video, or time.

I'm hoping at this point, someone else may be able to come in an lend some assistance, or at least crazy ideas

[huntercc]

I appreciate all of your responses, I feel like crazy ideas are all I might have left

I will give this another try later today and share the results

[claydoh]

Particularly if there is only one OS on this system, you might have to hit, stab repeatedly, or mashing (with the appropriate prayers and/or curses) the shift key when powering on to get the grub menu. Sometimes this seems to be tricky getting the timing of the key-press correct. The esc key may be key to use as well, but this is primarily for 64 bit EI systems, which does not seem to be the case here.

But if this shows the grub menu, then you could look at what specific settings grub is using, and perhaps edit that to get a working boot resolution, or use the recovery options and boot into safe graphics mode, which is what I assume that the live installer is doing.Then install the driver for this 'oddball' hardware, or do other tweaks .

If you can get grub to appear, the boot settings can be edited before running, for temporary testing purposes, before editing the gtub config files.

[huntercc]

I had no luck at all with mashing the shift keys (either one), or the ESC key. I did some more googling and found a suggestion to edit the grub config to uncomment the line

[FONT=Consolas]GRUB_TERMINAL=console[/FONT]

So I did that... and I finally got the grub menu! But now it's late, so I'm going to have to come back tomorrow and play some more.

[huntercc]

Trying to play around with this, but boot options are something I've not messed with very much before. I tried using nomodeset, tried removing quiet splash. Tried noapic. That's about all I've used before.

Any suggestions for things to try? I can now see the boot process flying by, and everything shows OK, until the screen suddenly flickers to something like "noise" and then the video goes out altogether.