What's happened to my Ubuntu installation?

GeX

GeX

GeX

Soldato
Joined
17 Dec 2002
Posts
6,948
Location
Manchester
Hi all.

I have a laptop with Ubuntu on, recently upgraded to 12.04 from 11.10. Before the upgrade the system was rock solid stable - but ever since upgrading I've been seeing more and more issues.

It began compiz crashing when trying to use Unity 3D, so I dropped to 2D. Now it will sometimes corrupt the screen after logging in - system locks.

Now it has begun to get picky about booting, and locks for a long period of time. If I leave it then I'll get this message;

MQXGI.jpg

What is likely to be going on here? I'm tempted to wipe it and start again - wonder if the upgrade has made a mess of things.
 
Personally, since I started using Ubuntu for various things about 5 years ago, I have tried to avoid doing release updates. Did 1 or 2 before, and the systems were just not quite the same after. Always prefered to either leave it as it was(just doing minor app updates) or do a complete fresh install.
 
It's difficult to tell but the message seems to be indicating that it hasn't found the hard drive it is trying to boot from.

How old is the laptop, could the hard drive be on it's way out? There is a suggestion in there which states checking bootdelay timeout. It may be worth increasing this if your hard drive has got a bit tempremental and takes longer to register with the system.

Adding bootdelay=30 to the kernel boot arguments would give the system 30 seconds to probe for the hard drive.
 
The laptop is quite old, but the SSD in there is ~6months old. The error didn't really make sense, as it must've found (and booted from) the drive to get that far.. it then hit a problem.
 
It has an OCZ Vertex (Agility) drive in there iirc.

I'll give that a go when I'm home. Weird that it has suddenly started doing this though.

Thanks :)
 
It may not necessarily be a dead drive, it may just be that the partition table has borked. I'd suggest booting from a Linux Live CD and checking whether you can mount all of the partitions.
 
It does boot every third(ish) attempt though; and it ran a check of the disk on one of those boots.
 
Well I intended to wipe it and install Mint, got the installer USB key ready and then found it wouldn't even try and boot from it.

Process of elimination led me to the DVD drive, with that remove it'd see the USB ports - but with it installed, it wouldn't. I wonder if that is causing the other issues. To test I've pulled the DVD drive and am going to use the laptop as is for a couple of days. Seems better already.
 
Looks like the block device id used by the boot process has changed so it won't boot, you get the above ID by running "blkid /dev/yourdevice" - you sometimes see the above device mapping in /etc/fstab

What is / was the device it is referring to? have you removed anything?
 
I know it doesn't help your problem, but if you have been using Ubuntu for a long time, why not switch to something more stable, like Debian?

Also for your boot from USB problem 2 posts up, try using Unetbootin. Google it .:D
 
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