Subj : Slimmed down Debian To : Ky Moffet From : Barry Martin Date : Thu Aug 29 2019 19:32:00 Hi Ky! > > And as a FWIW: might want to get "Boot Repair Disk": > > https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Boot-Repair > KM> Used something similar when Mint's GRUB committed seppuku (how? I > KM> *LOOKED* in the video config util. Didn't touch anything, just > KM> looked. Reproducible. > I had a somewhat similar issue with Windows ages ago: use a specific > option on a communication utility I used with BBS mailrun and it (the > utility) would then fail and needed to be reloaded. Eventually found a > specific file as being corrupted; found could just copy in that one file. > Eventually renamed that one file to act as a placeholder, copied in, and > no more problems. Apparently didn't like where it was on the hard > drive. KM> Yeah, had something like that going on with the 286 and KM> WordPerfect. Apparently when the config file loaded from disk, it KM> got corrupted, but the copy in memory was okay. So the solution KM> was to do a copy-from-here-to-there of the config file as part of KM> the WP startup batch file, so it would have the good copy KM> (stashed outside the WP directory) in memory even tho the on-disk KM> file got corrupted. It works and is somewhat easy to set up to automatically do! BTW, sort of back on "Boot Repair Disk", in the meantime had updated another of my Frontends (for MythTV) here and it had no issues: update, reboot, everything working as it should. KM> Might have been a side effect of that system having some bad RAM KM> that was locked out by guessing the address until it stopped KM> crashing. No necessarily bad, just not fully compatible. My 486 had some RAM which worked-but-didn't. Tested fine; swapped with the guy who built the system for me and he never had any problems. > KM> This is why I dumped Mint, tho I gather the > KM> bug has since been fixed.) Took about two seconds. But it was > KM> just rewriting GRUB. If it has to do a sector hunt for where the > KM> partition should start/end, it would take longer. I don't know if > KM> it's significant that Mint is based on Ubuntu, but... seems to me > KM> the bootloader should be absolutely bulletproof and bombproof. > If I were to troubleshoot Mint being based on Ubuntu would be a starting > point. As for bullet- an bombproof, should be, but nothing is. KM> You'd think. But Mint is basically Ubuntu Lite -- only loads KM> about 25% as much Stuff. (And runs WAY faster on the same KM> hardware. Mint will run perfectly fine on a PC where Ubuntu won't KM> even load.) So the problem might actually have been something KM> that was omitted. Except I vaguely recall hearing that Ubuntu 17 KM> had the same problem, except with a different trigger. Which KM> still doesn't eliminate "something omitted". The "something omitted" seems to make sense, especially with the loads faster (because some stuff isn't being loaded!). FWIW came across a command that may have been useful: "system-analyze blame". Lists the time it takes to load a boot process from longest to quickest. KM> Of course if you want Ubuntu Really Lite and Really Fast, there's KM> Puppy, which is based on U. but is only about 10% as big. I've been cheating and pulling some of the old hard drives out, replacing them with SSDs. One had a 20 GB HDD in it! Actually the hard drive was fine, just took forever to load -- good thing was 7200 RPM and not 5400! KM> That, BTW, was one of my ongoing gripes with older linux: why on KM> earth does the average user need to load every daemon every KM> written? Apache webserver, running for no reason on a desktop KM> machine, WTF?? No wonder performance was so awful. Most of 'em KM> seem to have stopped loading that sort of stuff, having finally KM> noticed that server and desktop are not contiguous functions. Um, just in case? No, no reason to load something if it isn't being used. LIS in another message, I've seen 'error messages' because it tests for something that isn't there, so I get an message essentially meaning "error loading because it's not there". A little sloppy but suppose has to be tested for that piece of hardware at boot. (Thinking of Bluetooth, which I don't have on this machine.) > KM> GPT is needed for HDs that exceed 2.2TB. > So that wasn't the issue as only a 250 GB SSD. The problem got > corrected, I didn't bother to try to figure out what the correction was. KM> Of course now there's the confusion between UEFI and Legacy BIOS, KM> and assorted related things I haven't been arsed to pay attention KM> to so long as everything works. Pretty much here too. My Big Issue when building the last two large machines here was not being familiar with UEFI, IOMMI, and a bad RAM stick. Didn't know the RAM was bad, so that did some interestig things during installation whoich I thought was due to the BIOS settings. Not sure why the Ubuntu installation doesn't configure some things automatically; did get it all figured out eventually. > KM> I have a bunch of > KM> systems all about the same age, 2009ish, and only the Dell > KM> supports GPT, as we discovered when the rest all rejected a 3TB > KM> HD. (Hmm. I could put it in the PowerEdge.) > I'm not keeping track of the dates; enough for me to remember what > hardware is inside! (And usually that's only when working on it!) Any > system requiring a large storage device also needs to be fast so > automatically new/newer. KM> Large storage and faster don't necessarily follow. Main thing KM> isn't speed, but whether the BIOS supports that large HD. You can KM> hook a very large drive to an exceedingly old system, if it has KM> proper support. Or if the drive has translation support, like old KM> Disk Manager or WD's external drive cases, which have their own. KM> (Which is how I have a 4TB and a 6TB hanging off Bullet's USB3 KM> card, tho Bullet doesn't support over 2TB.) Yes. I have run into the hard drive size where internal drives have a maximum limit but that external drives can be a heck of a lot larger. And not sure if this is accurate but the Raspberry Pi 3 takes significantly longer to start up with a large SD card. IIRC 8- and 16-GB cards load in a few seconds but a 64 GB card takes a couple of minutes. KM> Incidentally if those large external HD cases fail you can't just KM> hook the HD to a PC and off you go. They use their own KM> translation scheme so old systems can read/write a disk beyond KM> their native capacity, so to read the drive it has to be in an KM> external case with the correct firmware. Fortunately there are KM> lots of 'em on ebay, shucked by cloud companies who discovered KM> these were a cheaper way to buy bulk large HDs. Yes. Some time back I had purchased MadDog (brand) HDD enclosures. Worked fine with various drives (swapping the drive as necessary over the years). ...Needed for some project so stuck in a drive, plugged in the USB, not detected. Check connections; should work. ...Ended up the adapter was no longer supported by Linux and I think I had read Windows also. > KM> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GUID_Partition_Table > KM> Well, I guess I'm covered on the PowerEdge (with > KM> its gaggle of 3TB HDs), cuz it'll need a 64bit OS to make good > KM> use of it, and they all handle it. > Is the PowerEdge the system you were given a few months ago? Seems like > it had a few multi-TB drives and several smaller ones. At the time > wouldn't boot as was a remote boot. KM> Yep, "What to do with a giant server" over in Windows. Right. Sometimes the "it looks neat but no idea what to do with it" is part of the fun! KM> It has 8 3TB HDs. It had 4 480GB SSDs, which got filched to KM> upgrade other stuff. Did I mention how I accidentally made a USB KM> bootable Win7?? :) Not yet! KM> Supported OSs, handy in a Dell notice today: KM> PowerEdge R510 KM> Operating System: KM> Novell SuSE Linux ES 11, KM> Windows Server 2008 x64, KM> Windows Server 2012, KM> Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6, KM> Windows Server 2012 R2, KM> Windows Server 2008 x86, KM> Windows Server 2003 x64, KM> Suse Linux ES 10 KM> It can also run ESXi (Bare Metal Hypervisor, VMware). There KM> exists a free version which I've fetched but haven't looked at KM> yet. Waiting until get snow-bound and so no interuptions?! KM> I haven't seen a linux server edition since Novell switched to KM> SuSE some 15 years ago (that was also their last seminar), so KM> pretty clueless there! Its big selling point was really good KM> remote management. And IIRC you are able to get that, for a year or two anyway. ¯ ® ¯ Barry_Martin_3@ ® ¯ @Q.COM ® ¯ ® .... The end is near; but wait for the sequel! --- MultiMail/Win32 v0.47 þ wcECHO 4.2 ÷ ILink: The Safe BBS þ Bettendorf, IA --- QScan/PCB v1.20a / 01-0462 * Origin: ILink: CFBBS | cfbbs.no-ip.com | 856-933-7096 (454:1/1) .