[workaround exists] Problems booting live cds and lucid upgrade

[dibl]

Re: Problems booting live cds and lucid upgrade

Update: I discovered today that the 32-bit live cds for karmic k/ubuntu DO boot

Dr. D -- I think this is significant. Every once in awhile I see a post from someone with allegedly 64-bit hardware, which won't seem to play nice with the 64-bit OS. I'm no digital engineer, but I take it that not only the CPU must be a 64-bit design, but also all memory buses, chipset interfaces, and I/O to the hard drive controllers. I wonder if you've got a platform that is somehow compromised in its ability to run the 64-bit OS?

[doctordruidphd]

Re: Problems booting live cds and lucid upgrade

I wonder if you've got a platform that is somehow compromised in its ability to run the 64-bit OS?

I don't think so; this is an intel 9550 core2dual quad, with 8gb ram, and it look like it does in fact see all of that ram. So far, no failure in any 64-bit programs. Still, that could be. Any ideas how I could test this more exhaustively?

[dibl]

Re: Problems booting live cds and lucid upgrade

Other than running through all the 64-bit Live CDs that the Linux distros offer, I dunno.

Did it originally come with a pre-installed Windows OS? Was that a 32-bit OS? If it was custom-designed to be sold with a pre-installed Windows 32-bit OS, they might have cut a corner or two in the component selection, thinking the customer would never know.

[doctordruidphd]

Re: Problems booting live cds and lucid upgrade

Yeah, it originally came with 64-bit Vista.

I did some googling and found the following tests:

greenman@Wolfenstein:~/Downloads$ uname -a
Linux Wolfenstein 2.6.31-20-generic #57-Ubuntu SMP Mon Feb 8 09:02:26 UTC 2010 x86_64 GNU/Linux
greenman@Wolfenstein:~/Downloads$ grep flags /proc/cpuinfo
flags : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 clflush dts acpi mmx fxsr sse sse2 ss ht tm pbe syscall nx lm constant_tsc arch_perfmon pebs bts rep_good pni dtes64 monitor ds_cpl vmx smx est tm2 ssse3 cx16 xtpr pdcm sse4_1 xsave lahf_lm tpr_shadow vnmi flexpriority
flags : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 clflush dts acpi mmx fxsr sse sse2 ss ht tm pbe syscall nx lm constant_tsc arch_perfmon pebs bts rep_good pni dtes64 monitor ds_cpl vmx smx est tm2 ssse3 cx16 xtpr pdcm sse4_1 xsave lahf_lm tpr_shadow vnmi flexpriority
flags : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 clflush dts acpi mmx fxsr sse sse2 ss ht tm pbe syscall nx lm constant_tsc arch_perfmon pebs bts rep_good pni dtes64 monitor ds_cpl vmx smx est tm2 ssse3 cx16 xtpr pdcm sse4_1 xsave lahf_lm tpr_shadow vnmi flexpriority
flags : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 clflush dts acpi mmx fxsr sse sse2 ss ht tm pbe syscall nx lm constant_tsc arch_perfmon pebs bts rep_good pni dtes64 monitor ds_cpl vmx smx est tm2 ssse3 cx16 xtpr pdcm sse4_1 xsave lahf_lm tpr_shadow vnmi flexpriority

The x86_64 in uname, and the lm flags in cpuinfo mean it's 64, according to the info I found.
Now, that doesn't test the rest of the architecture, so it's still possible there is a problem. Although, the previous 64-bit Sidux disk (aether) and the current 11.2 opensuse disk, both 64-bit, boot fine, and the installed systems run. Also, I manually loaded the 2.6.32-whatever-is-current-lucid kernel into a karmic system, and it boots and runs (apparently) fine. But as a professor once said, "Nothing is more dangerous that a computer output the looks right..."

[dibl]

Re: Problems booting live cds and lucid upgrade

Heh -- smart professor!

You know, it would be a little painful but you could install sidux Aither 64-bit and then update it. As I recall, Aither is KDE4 and Grub legacy, so it's not a bad basis, and then you can upgrade it with some very long package downloads .... I'd wait to install OOO until after you've got the rest of the system updated. Just a thought ...

[doctordruidphd]

Re: Problems booting live cds and lucid upgrade

That's the strange part. I installed aether a while back, and have kept it up to date. It now has a 2.6.32 kernel on it, and boot just fine. I recently upgraded to grub2, and still all is well. So it's booting and running with software more recent than the moros cd. So I don't get it.

The problem behind all this is that upgrading karmic>lucid produces a broken system. But I can't seem to get the lucid cds -- or the karmic cds -- to boot. I originally thought that the reason karmic>lucid is breaking might be related to the reason the cds aren't working, but I've moved away from that idea. We'll wait until beta before I really scream about lucid, although it's frustrating because it WAS working quite well until whatever upgrade happened on Jan 8th. I sure wish I'd saved that update list; oh well.

Still, the cd's should work, and the fact that sidux -- and now, the most recent lenny disk -- won't boot is beginning to get me worried.

[sithlord48]

Re: Problems booting live cds and lucid upgrade

i have a friend who can't seem to boot karmic disks (any kernel higher then 2.6.31-11,) and they all hang at the same spot , if you don't turn off splash it just hangs on the screen right before splash comes up .. when you boot one of those iso's with out "quite and splash" hangs on the ATA disk, but only when you run a "recovery mode" otherwise it hangs on the initial booting from <uuid> screen. perhaps these two issues are related in some way. upgrading seems to work for him as long as the kernel is not updated.... only thing is this is on a 32-bit machine.

[doctordruidphd]

Re: Problems booting live cds and lucid upgrade

Thanks for the ideas. Booting the cds doesn't work even if quiet and splash are removed; I've tried several other options, and it still won't fly. Another thing I noticed is that on the karmic>lucid upgrade, if I boot the older 2.6.31 kernel, it still hangs in the same place, and always on a test system without quiet and splash.

There are a number of changes to the way upstart works from karmic to lucid, and I'm betting it's one or more of those that's killing it, preventing the file system from mounting. But the kernel itself does boot. So I think this is a different problem than why the cds won't boot at all.

Again, I do appreciate the ideas. Sooner or later, we're bound to hit on it.

[Guest]

Re: Problems booting live cds and lucid upgrade

We're in the same boat. I did a clean install of Karmic because I wanted to move from a 32-bit to 64-bit system on my Dell XPS 630i. I found that neither the Kubuntu nor Ubuntu x86_64 LiveCDs would work. They produce only the endlessly blinking cursor in the upper left corner of the screen.

I eventually got around this problem for Karmic by installing a remix of Ubuntu called Zenix. It had no problems booting on my hardware and the install went smoothly. However, this distro uses XFCE by default and I wanted to use KDE, so I installed kubuntu-desktop and have been using that since as my default DE. I had planned to try just doing a fresh install of Kubuntu Desktop x86_64 for 10.04 but I have run into the same problem. It seems you have saved me the trouble of downloading the other official ISOs, checking MD5sums, verifying the burned data, etc. I was about to upgrade but have decided to wait because of your report of Karmic -> Lucid producing a broken system.

It appears that Zenix is expected to have a new release in May sometime (10.05), so maybe I will hold off and try that when it comes out.

****************
EDIT: I decided to go for broke and upgrade Karmic to Lucid. The upgrade completed fine and the only snag was the "error: the symbol 'grub_puts_' not found" message, which prevented me from booting temporarily. I was able to fix grub using this guide. http://grub.enbug.org/Grub2LiveCdInstallGuide

I am now running Lucid on the Dell XPS 630i. I do hope that someone finds out the root cause of this problem. However, now that my system is working, I probably won't devote a whole lot of extra time to figuring this out.

[doctordruidphd]

Re: Problems booting live cds and lucid upgrade

FYI -- the problem seems to be with several distributions in the debian tree. Debian itself, Sidux and *buntu, all using 2.6.32 or later kernels, all crash the install cd's. OpenSUSE, which is rpm-based and an entirely different development tree, boots fine with its latest cd, which is either -32 or -33.

I am running a lucid system, which actually began as hardy. But when folks say, "Try a clean install," well, that is in one ear and out the other, until this gets fixed.

[dibl]

Re: Problems booting live cds and lucid upgrade

This may be relevant: http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pag...item&px=ODE5Ng

Looks like your chances are best, at the moment, with the Alternate Install CD.

[doctordruidphd]

Re: Problems booting live cds and lucid upgrade

Looks like your chances are best, at the moment, with the Alternate Install CD.

What has emerged on the launchpad bug track is that it may be some kind of hardware incompatibility. It certainly affects all Dell XPS630i's, and some other systems as well. That includes the alternates. Has nothing to do with splash or any other settable kernel parameter, unfortunately. Some people can get the disks to boot by changing different kernel parameters, but there remains a group of us for whom that does not work. The only option is to install 9.04 and upgrade, which works, but does not set up what I would consider a "clean" installation, as far as testing video drivers, etc.

[doctordruidphd]

Re: Problems booting live cds and lucid upgrade

A workaround has been posted to launchpad, that will allow Dell (and possible other) systems that will not boot from the CDs to do so.

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+s...er/+bug/519123

The workaround is to add a mem=### line to the custom boot options in the CDs boot menu (using F6). You figure the amount of memory as follows:

Formula to determine your memory is:
X*1024*1024*1024=mem
replace X with number of GB ram you have.
Example:
4GB Ram = 4*1024*1024*1024=4294967296
So for Dell 64 bit systems with 4GB ram, add "mem=4294967296" to the end of the boot options string.
For 6GB ram systems, add "mem=6442450944.

For 8gb, the correct parameter is: mem=8589934592

Finally...