installation and boot problem

[vatcrimson]

I had kubuntu 7.10 and I tried to install kubuntu 8.04 last night but I had some troubles:
my system has a cd reader and a cd burner; when I booted using the installation CD (in the reader), the installation process stopped when it tried to load the kernel.
I saw these errors on the screen:
**************
ata2.01: exception EMask 0x0 SAct 0x0 SErr 0x0 action 0x2 frozen
ata2.01: cmd ...
ata2.01: status: [DRDY ERR]
ata2.01: revalidation failed (errno = -5)
**************
Trying to boot from the cd burner I had no errors, so I went on with all the installation, erasing all my old partitions of the two ide disks and making only a root partition on the first disk (10Gb) and a home & swap partitions on the second one (4GB).

Removing the disc and rebooting, the boot stops when "Loading hardware drivers" with the same errors that I wrote before... looping every 5 seconds.
Pressing ctrl-alt-del I got a login screen (tty) but the FS was mounted ro and I did not manage to understand the problem...

Any idea? Is there any other info I can post to help you in supporting me?

Thanks in advance.

Ciao,
V.

[vatcrimson]

Re: installation and boot problem

I rolled back to 7.10 and then I tried to upgrade using apt-get... all it's working ok if I use the old kernel (2.6.22-14-generic) but if I try to boot with the new one (2.6.24-16-generic) I get the same error...

Ciao,
V.

[flash_gordon]

Re: installation and boot problem

Just out of curiosity how much ram have you on your rig? I noticed a strange thing with mine in that I had installed 8.04 and everything was great. Then I had increased my ram to 4G of OCZ DDR Platinum EL Dual Channel and 8.04 would just hang. I could boot into windoze XP SP2 no problem. So I tried the Live CD to eliminate a hard drive issue ( I have linux on it's own drive). No go, would not boot did the same thing. Removed 2 GB of Ram, booted no problem at all.
Uninstalled 8.04 and reinstalled 7.04, reinstalled the other 2 GB of ram (4 GB again) and no problem 7.04 booted and ran perfectly. Just for ****s and giggles I reformated and tried to reinstall 8.04 would not work unless I only had 2 GB of ram!! Anyone else having this issue. I have tested the ram with Memtest and no errors.

Asus P4P800-E DELUXE
P4 - 3.0E
4 GB OCZ DDR Platinum EL Dual Channel Ram
160 GB Sata hdd (windoze XP)
500 GB Sata hdd (Storage)
40 GB Maxtor (Kubuntu)
Nvidia 7300GT 512MB AGP 8X

[vatcrimson]

Re: installation and boot problem

only 256 MB...

[Guest]

Re: installation and boot problem

I have had a similar problem after upgrading.
I fixed it (in the short term at least) by booting an older kernal version.
When starting up the machine use Esc to load the Grub Menu.
Select the third option in the list "Ubuntu 8.04.1, kernel 2.6.22-14-generic"

The machine should then boot as normal.

If it does you can change the default boot option by editing your grub menu file.
open the file "/boot/grub/menu.lst" as sudo
Change the line "default 0" to "default 2"
This should be the number of the grub entry you used to boot successfully. The first entry is 0.
I used the third option in the list, The first option you see is counted as 0, therefore I used "default 2"
Look at the bottom of the file to see all the possible entries in order.

Save the file.

When you next reboot the machine the older Kernel will be loaded by default.

In the long term you will probably have to wait for a fix to the 2.6.24 kernel