Hi, eveybody !

I have this problem for a while and been looking for a solution but haven't got one. I run Salix os ( a distro based on slackware that tweaked for desktop envirenment ) on my laptop which is Dell m5110, before salix I run slackware 13.7 very well, after slackware14.0 and following salix 14.0 rc1 came out, I removed the slackware and installed salix, everything get settled but the one that failing to boot the system when and then, it's like about one failure out of 10 or 15 times. salix os 14.0 final has come out for while and i kept updating , the problem remains. whole screen filled with black and white stikes when it failed to boot and i have to power off to reboot, usually it can be booted successfully at the second time. I used a liveCD and run the fsck to check the /root partition , outcome shows clean. this really start to become a pain, but I really like the salix. Need your help, please !
btw, I got windows 7 preinstalled when i purchased laptop .

partition info as following:

/dev/sda1 2048 206847 102400 de Dell Utility
/dev/sda2 * 206848 30926847 15360000 7 HPFS/NTFS/exFAT
/dev/sda3 30926848 133326847 51200000 7 HPFS/NTFS/exFAT
/dev/sda4 133326848 625137344 245905248+ 5 Extended
/dev/sda5 * 133326911 175285215 20979152+ 83 Linux
Partition 5 does not start on physical sector boundary.
/dev/sda6 175285279 280157535 52436128+ 83 Linux
Partition 6 does not start on physical sector boundary.
/dev/sda7 280157599 625137344 172489873 7 HPFS/NTFS/exFAT
Partition 7 does not start on physical sector boundary.

/dev/sda5 ext4 20G 7.8G 11G 42% /
/dev/sda6 ext4 50G 33G 15G 70% /home
/dev/sda7 fuseblk 165G 144G 22G 88% /media/sda7
/dev/sda2 fuseblk 15G 5.7G 9.0G 39% /media/sda2
/dev/sda3 fuseblk 49G 40G 9.5G 81% /media/sda3
tmpfs tmpfs 1.7G 6.5M 1.7G 1% /dev/shm


Any advice would be appreciated !

I suspect you have an advanced format drive. The error posted 'does not start on a physical sector boundary is not good news.

See this link for a discussion on how to fix it.

-->https://www.linuxquestions.org/quest...683/page2.html

I can't be sure this is causing the failure to boot, but its a good bet.

does that mean i have to remove all data and rewirte the partition ?

Unfortunately, yes, that is the only way to fix the miss alignment. I also discovered with these large drives this problem. The key thing is to use the correct tool to write the partitions. There are tutorials on this topic.

that is really bad news. that is way too exhausted. do you think there are any alternatives ? what if let the windows handle the booting instead of lilo ? and why was everything smooth when I run slackware ?

While misaligned partitions will have serious impact on performance (and no, there is no alternative to repartitioning) they should not prevent the system from boot.
Is there anything special when the error appears? Like colder environment as usual, system was powered down for a longer time, ... . Anything that is different from when the boot works normally?

No, just prevent from installing the OS, IME!
My 2-cents.

BTW, thanks to the poster from Hungary!

Not even that, the OS will install, as there is nothing really wrong, no failure or something, all you will see is decreased performance due to the misalignment.

nothing special, it just get frozed once in a while , it's about at the 30% of the whole booting process, and no response from anything when it happened. the freezing screen with white and black stikes, sometimes it shows up like a fraction of a second during the normal booting process.

and about misaligned partitions, some says it's just the program 'fdisk' geting a little bit old and messing up and doesn't affect anything. It's geting me confused. and what about the normal booting process when i run slackware? I found out that salix's default kernel is a generic one, not a huge type, could that matter ?

misaligned partitions start from sda5, if i'd like to repartitioning, do I need to remove sda1-4 or just remove sda5-7 ?

thank you all , I really appreciate.

That sounds like a problem with initializing the video hardware. Possibly a driver bug that occurs only under some rare circumstances.
Are you using the open source or the proprietary video driver?

fdisk just shows the information stored for partitions on the disk. If the partitions are misaligned can be checked very easy: Just look if the start sector of the partition can be divided by 8 (disks with "Advanced Format" use sector sizes of 4KB, logical sectors are 512B, 4KB/512B=8). To fix that you only need to re-partitions those partitions where this is not the case.
The kernel is not involved in here.

1 members found this post helpful.

I'm using the default one ,the open source video dirver. should I try the proprietary one ? it must be a silly question, however, I already spit it out .

I would recommend to use the proprietary driver on any latop with AMD video device, it has better power-management and more functions.

TobiSGD, thanks for your recommendation, I'm currently using the latest proprietary driver, so far so good !

If it solved this , I'll stick with it, re-partitions is too much work, besides, from what i learned it seems only affect I/O performence, after all there won't be much I/O for a laptop that usded in a desktop envirenment.
Anyway, I still learned a lot from here, thank you all indeed !