yancek, it returned "clean, abc# files, xyz# blocks" so that looks OK

HB, I am trying to install normal Ubuntu 14.04 "alongside" while I download 16.04 on my wife's computer

The "normal" Ubuntu 14.04 install failed.

Now three weeks and 3 days into my attempt to add Ubuntu Mate to the existing Ubuntu Fall-back 12.04, I see no future in continuing this incredibly frustrating exercise. As you can tell, I am like a bulldog with a bone, but I think there is nothing left of the bone.

So, with reluctance to quit, but being realistic, I would just like to thank all those who have tried to help me through this, especially sgosnell, robertbas, beachboy2, yancek, and HiggsBosun (and anyone else who deserves special mention, but I have not remembered). You have really racked your brains to find a solution and I am very grateful for your many suggestions.

Time to replace this SSD with a new one, and put the older one into another older spare machine to get back to later in case I get another case of computer masochism.

Best wishes,
robert

no worries Odyssey1942, it certainly has been a journey and we are feeling the fail as much as you...

But

1. Before you toss it all, using Gparted of a live disk loaded into ram, check the "Boot" option is enabled on the drive you have installed your mbr/grub too. For clarity there should only be one drive marked/flaged "Boot".
If there is more than one drive marked to boot, unmark the extra ones but keep a note of them...

2. Boot into your 12.04 and run update-grub.

If you 1204 doesnt boot redo step1 marking one of the previously marked drives "Boot". Don't forget to unmark all the others... then repeat step2

One day you will return to that drive with refreshed knowledge and you will be successfully get it going, Partitioning a drive can get messy no matter what OS you put on it... so don't bury that bone too deep 8) ... Antiquated as it sounds, a small 100MB MSDOS partition for your MBR is the best option.

Also, please express your thanks to us by marking, "Did you find this post helpful" on the bottom of posts

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Robert, Thanks for mentioning the "Did you find this post helpful" thing. It is startling to be made aware of things that have been right there in front of me and I haven't previously seen them. Excellent idea and I will certainly use it as appropriate in future.

I have learned a lot during this exercise and raised my confidence in a few narrow areas. All good. I am happy to continue this thread on a time-to-time basis for so long as anyone is willing to be involved. Robert, you have said something that reinforces that I need to do a bit of work on this boot/mbr/grub stuff. It is: I really do not understand this.

So I would be in the "Try without installing option" of a Live CD, or is it the install option?

Whichever it is, (1) where would I see "check the "Boot" option is enabled", and

(2) "on the drive you have installed your mbr/grub too." I just do not understand this. Please elaborate. Thanks.

To set a boot flag option, it is in the File Bar of Gparted/Partition/Manage Flags. You'll need to select a partition first.

Ubuntu's "Try Without Installing" has gparted on it

For the moment disregard my "on the drive you have installed your mbr/grub too"

Back in the 90's the only place one could install the MBR was within the first 2Gig of the first partition.
Then came UEFI and GPT. This gave more flexibility about how a Boot manager access's the MBR and where the MBR could be placed and what information the OS received during boot.
Back then one of the confusing things about the MBR was it is invisible

Check out the wiki subjects "BIOS" "UEFI" for a better explanation than I can provide. MBR will feature in those articles.

A lot of the information youll learn is un-nessasary to destop users until an issue develops with dual booting OS's or if you wanted to run a fully fledged server with mutiple disk arrays (raid).

IMHO Disk Partitoning is the hardest and most varible aspects of computing. It's that hard I don't normally bother trying to recover a non-booting system preferring to format the entire drive and start again.
In your circumstance you don't want to loose the 1204 you've got and I understand that.

Once you are through this section everything else will be a breeze...

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While I still have your attention, to frame my options for when I return to this computer/SSD, once I get 14.04 or 16.04 Ubuntu Mate (or another version/distro featuring a Gnome 2 type desktop) installed on that computer, and working to my satisfaction I have no further need for the 12.04 Ubuntu Fall-back. For background, I have backed up my /home from that 12.04 to a portable EXT4 HDD using BackInTime and I have written all of the user files to a DVD. Those data files seem to be usable also by a Windows computer (I copied the DVD to a folder on the desktop of a Win 10 computer and have been opening files and using them.) Now whether one could copy those DVD data files to a linux computer and use them without encountering permission issues, I don't know.

So when that time comes and I do exactly as you mentioned would you also recommend:

(a) that I just choose the Live CD installer, overwrite the entire disk** and install xyz all by itself onto the problem SSD to see if that clears up the current inability to install anything alongside the 12.04? Or

(b) using Something Else and choosing partitions and sizes after removing all existing partitions**. I am a little overwhelmed by all the great posts on this, but my inclination would be to make a 2GB (should it be smaller?) /boot, a /swap larger than the amount or RAM on the computer and system (balance of the available space on the drive)

(c) do (a) and if it works properly, do (b). Doing (b) assumes that the functioning of the drive and/or the install would be improved (otheriwse one would not bother) and I do not have an opinion about this.

(d) do (b), then only try (a) if (b) doesn't work satisfactorily

** very uncertain about how the existing 2GB sda1 should be treated. In (a) the installer will either remove it or not but in (b) I will be consolidating the existing partitions into one new unallocated space before setting up new partitions. Should I leave sda1 alone (it came with the SSD and I do not understand how essential it is to the proper functioning of the drive)? Your thoughts?

Hi odyssey1942
The mbr should be 500Mb but 1Gb would be ok.
But i will watch the post and see how you are doing.

1 members found this post helpful.

The MBR is and always has been 446 bytes. You seem to be confusing it with a boot partition or an EFI partition which are now generally 200-500MB. The label you have for sda1 is bios_grub and as indicated previously, this is usually 1MB. It might be useful to mount that partition from 12.04 and see what it contains and post that here. Someone should be able to advise.

http://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/linux-c...rd-dd-command/

2 members found this post helpful.

So you have actually been able to install Ubuntu 14.04 onto your machine.
Despite using an old motherboard with BIOS and the latest Samsung evo SSD, the OS nevertheless installed. So there isn't a hardware incompatibility issue.

So this is the moment when all your installation problems began.
Hibernate may not have worked because although you created a swap partition at install stage, there may be further commands needed to activate swap.
Furthermore, I agree 2GB swap is too small with 8GB RAM.
Even so, I can't see how a failure to hibernate will create any lasting problems.

What happened to your 14.04 install? Did you delete it because the /home directory in the 1TB HDD could no longer be seen?
Is your motherboard able to see the HDD?

If the SSD is new, you could try a quick replacement from the retailer citing installation problems and then see if the newer one is better.

1 members found this post helpful.

Hi Odyssey1942
This page may help you understand the boot process a little better.

http://www.tecmint.com/linux-boot-pr...nage-services/

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Thanks all. For clarification, my most recent post was to respond to robertbas, but I forgot to specifically say so. Re-reading it, I can imagine that I thought it would be obvious, but probably not so.

In order
yancek. Just in case there was confusion, the quote you mentioned was posted by visiondude. But for both, I am still significantly challenged on the subjects of mbr/grub/bios/boot/etc. I will try to do some reading and upgrade my understanding, but meanwhile I don't understand what y'all are suggesting.

For yancek, With apology, I really am a noob and don't know what that means. I don't know how to mount a partition, and even less about how to get whatever comes of that into a post. Any specific steps you could outline will be much appreciated.

Higgsboson It has been almost 4 weeks now, but here is as detailed a recap as I can give:
I trust that the above explains all.

Don't understand. How does the mobo see the HDD? In any case, other than opening the case, today I would not have any clue that there is a HDD in the box.

It is now 2 years old and I have certainly got my money's worth already. But it still works and may have lots of life yet if I just reinstall as per my last post.

Edit: visondude. thanks for the link (yours came in while I was writing the above). I stayed with it for a bit, but it rapidly went over my pay grade. Don't think I learned anything that helps me make sense of the earlier posts.

Your mobo is more important than your OS or anything else.
When you power on your pc, you have the option to go into BIOS before the OS boots. I expect you know this.

Once you choose to go into BIOS, the motherboard will say what hardware you have hooked onto it.
Since mobo manufacturers make different looking BIOS, I can't say which menu will list all the disk drives you have attached to your mobo.
However, when you get to that menu on the BIOS and it tells you it can only see your Samsung SSD but not your 1TB HDD, then this means your 1TB is dead.
If this is so, then for the sake of simplicity, open the case, physically remove the 1TB and kiss it goodbye.

If the mobo does list the 1TB HDD, then things are complicated (because the Ubuntu OS can't see it).
Please advise if your BIOS can detect your 1TB HDD.

Secondly, as Yancek mentioned, since you still have Ubuntu 12.04 you might as well use that OS to figure out what the problem is.
Obviously, the Ubuntu OS can run commands which can identify where the problem is on your machine.
So after looking in many places for your problem, finally we can look at that rather dodgy looking sda1 partition on your SSD.

To mount sda1 so you can look into it, open your /home directory on the GUI. On the left-hand side of the /home window, sda1 should be listed under 'Devices'. Double-click on it and it will be mounted (you will need to input root password).

Does this method work, and if so what directories and files are shown?

Edit: Yes, but gparted can no longer see the 1TB HDD.
And on your install of Ubuntu 14.04, the installer wrote your /home partition onto your 1TB HDD. This could've be the final write which killed the HDD.

1 members found this post helpful.

Yes, I am aware of that. Just trying to clear up the difference between MBR and boot partitions.

The term MBR (master boot record) refers to sector one on the hard drive. Any hard drive. This is a specific physical location on the hard drive where some code is placed. It is actually very tiny and basically has code which points to another location on the hard drive where the boot files are. That other location is usually on the system partition which in your case would be sda2 where Ubuntu is installed. It can also be on a separte boot partition. In most cases for regular users, there isn't any real need to have a separate boot partition.

The BIOS code is physically on chips on the system/motherboard and has a number of basic options to configure which include listing hard drives, dvd/cd drives, setting boot priority and a number of other settings.

The term boot used as a verb simply means start. You also have boot directories on almost all systems, Linux and windows. Both will sometimes have separate boot partitions.

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1. Your Option A...
Do your option A using the "Install Ubuntu" option from the splash screen.After the install boot into it, have a quick play, install gparted, have a look at the drive layout using gparted..
NB1, gparted isnt default install when doing a full install, it is using the "Try First".
NB2 Try not to use the installer from the live disk, ie try not to use the installer that is present in the menu of the system that boots from "Try First" selection.

1.5 Goal - Double Check Odyssey1942 has seen the drive selector in gparted.
Regarding the 1TB drive. Start gparted - In the top right hand side of the file bar there is a drop down which enables you to select which drive to work on... does the 1TB show up there?

2. The goal- create two empty partitons for two OS installs and let the installer partition the drives...
Boot the Ubuntu install disk, select "Try without any changes" (or words to that effect)
Start up gparted, unmount any mounted drives, delete all drives and partitions. Now make two big partitions of free space but don't format or add drives into the partitons. Flag the first partition "Boot" ie gparted/Partitions/Manage Flags
3. Reboot and do two installs. Let the installer partition the drives using the free spaces. Boot into each install after complaeteing each install, install gparted, check out the drives

4.Goal - Partiton the drives 'how you want to' using gparted...
Boot the Ubuntu install disk, select "Try without any changes" (or words to that effect)
Start up gparted, unmount any mounted drives, delete all drives and partitions ie the two installs you've just done.
5. Reboot, Do an install. During this install you should only have to 'label' the drives ie /root /home /swap etc...boot into the installs

6. Now try your B

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Thanks. Busy putting out fires right now, but will post again on this asap.