yancek, could I sworn I wrote about this yesterday, but don't see it now. Your abc tutorial was just what I needed. I did already understand most of the elements, but seeing it tied together like that helps a bunch.

HB and robertb, I am now convinced that the HDD went toes up. I looked in the BIOS as HB suggested and the only other device than the DVD and the SSD was a 2.2TB Infinity (which I had previously disabled trying to simplify, apparently not thinking about the fact that I did not recognize it at all). See this:

https://hardforum.com/threads/restar...error.1704366/

This sounds very familiar, i.e., my experience on the Saturday morning when the computer would not boot.

In addition, I went into gparted and confirm that there is no HDD showing at all. So will pull it tomorrow and try reinstalling UM 15.10 to the SSD to see what happens without the ersatz HDD in there.

rb, I now have 12.04 Ubuntu Fall-back installed into sda2. Since the beginning of this saga when I was OTO successful in installing Ubuntu Mate into sda3 on the Thursday before the lights went out on the HDD on the Sat. I cannot install anything in addition to the 12.04. So not sure how to proceed with your instructions. Hope I am not being dense.

It is possible that by disabling that drive in bios it could be holding things up. Also printers, some camera's and other devices can be mistaken by the bios as a harddrive, especially anything capable of holding memory...

After unpluggin everything un-nessary from the mobo, including ram chips, (leave 1 ram chip in obviously) unplug the power from the pc and unplug the monitor from pawer and pc.
With all power off press the power buttons on the pc and moniter. Plug it all back up and on but essential only.

The purpose of the above is to clear all the residue power, retained settings and memory from all the chip-sets...unpluging everything un-nessary maximisers the power to the drive.

The disabled drive...
Im almost ready to give-up on the suspect drive.
Unplug from the mobo all connected drives, especially the disabled one. Unplug everything else from the computer except the bare essectials.. Plug the suspect one in, check bios for it, if it's there boot a live disk and check it in gparted... if still no go, shelve it for attention at a later date - perhaps find the manufactorers software on a live disk and run that...

the drive that is working...
Now that everything unnessasary is unplugged, including printer, network etc...Plug the drive in that is working and try two (2X) installs of 12.04, if that works try an install of UM 15...


Multiple installs of 1204 should work on that ssd. If they dont I would try to install a different distro than ubuntu to double check... The debian installer partitioner has a nice feature where it will carve your drive up in three diffent ways including a server layout...

If the above has not worked find the drive maufactorers software and run a low-level format which normally takes a 2 to 5 hours. Then give the above another go...

If none of that works shelv your drives, by another one and try a multiple install on a new one... if that works, i would not bother pluggin the old drives back into the mobo, instead to reuse the shelved drives grab a "external multiple drive caddy" and run them from the usb. An external caddy has independent power.

You may note I spend a lot of time proving my hardware is at fault before my firmware or software. I am very old-school, its slow, laborious, but it is very thorough. In 15 years i've had 5 drive fails. Of them I've only had 2 drives i could not get going again.

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Robert, really clear instructions with one exception. I take it that I should NOT leave the 1GB sda1 and the 12.04 Ubuntu Fall-back on sda2 that still works in place? Or should I be working around them in which case the "try two (2X) installs of 12.04" would make a total of three?

Edit: just went back and reread your last few posts and now think I understand that I should leave sda1 and sda2 alone, working in the currently unused space. Will proceed on that assumption doing the hardware "cleanse" first. We are having family over for Easter and today will be both busy preparing and limited in horizontal work space where I can stand to do the work on the hardware. Will hope to do this before mid-afternoon, but it may be late tomorrow. Just depends on the "melon list". But in any case, plenty of time to set me straight on the installs if necessary.

Edit2: Just realized that the 12.04 on sda2 is Fall-back and I do not remember how to do that. For purposes of the exercise outlined, will plain vanilla 12.04 do just as well for proving purposes?

heya Odyssey1942,



yep, unplug all unnessary devices including drives, network tec, do a reboot, do the power discharge routine, then reboot, then try for an additional 12.04 vanilla install.

If this doesnt work you've got a $100 decision to make

At this point your going to be faced with the decision to preserve the 12.04 fallback install by not formating the drive entirely or to buy another drive and then trying to run them dual boot.
I suspect trying to dual boot may bring back this issue.

If you decide to format it completely, this will also clear the mbr & boot files, which are suspect areas of this issue. We will also get the option to pull out any more than opne ram chip, the video card if it has one and reset the bios factory default

Formating the drive completely should allow you to make as many 12.04 multiple installs as you like. If you cant make multiple installs of 12.04 something is likely wrong with the ssd.

As to higher versions, lets move onto them after we've 'proofed' the hardware with an OS that is known to work.

Thanks for yours. Learned late last night that I must leave right after the family do here today to go attend to something urgent which may take one day, maybe more. Did not get the computer apart yesterday so that will have to wait until my indefinite return.

I am 99.99% sure that "opne ram chip" was a typo which should be "one ram chip", but in that slim chance that it is not that, I want to get this as right as I can, so please elaborate. If a typo, no response needed.

A possible alternative. I have an unused HDD. I am thinking that I should install it in place of the 1T HDD that "disappeared" (likely ersatz) and put the 1T into another computer, run gparted to see if it is recognized. If so, can deal with it after sorting the SSD. If not, would you agree that the 1T is a toss?

While the HDD's are being switched out, I can disconnect the SSD and then install U Mate to the "new" HDD. Assuming successful, which I would expect, there will be not need to retain the previous 12.04. I can then go back and reformat the entire SSD and try the twin 12.04 installs as per yours. If successful, then replace both with a single install of 15.10 U Mate.

I am of the "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" school. In my experience, and given the age of this computer, the more I disconnect/take apart, the greater the chance of damaging something which is working well at the moment.

This is just a suggestion, and I am happy to follow yours to the letter if you think I should go straight to it. But if the above gets me to the bank and involves doing less now.....? What do you think?

Quite the opposite. Heatsinks, slots, mother-boards, fans, especally fans, love been taken apart and given a good dust off...

if it has two ram chips in it take one out. Take the one furtherest from the CPU out. We are proofing the ram, so to speak. May as well take them all out, dust out the slots and make sure they are seating properly when you re-install them, but only one for the first few boots.

Hopefully the smallest chip you have in that pc is a 512 and that's enough to run that U12, stripped and lab'd.
Hopefully it is not a 6 slot board with a mixture of different chips.

The above is an excellent idea. I was also going to suggest but did not want to confuse you with choice.

Harddrives can sometimes be temperamental beasts but it is possible to repair them by dusting them across thier assign pins, reseating thier plugs, making sure the power plug wires in the power plug havn't pulled, low-level formating, running the manufacturers sevice software, running other recovery process's on them, writing out bad sectors in the partition table, plus many other things ,

Somtimes stuff just don't get along, especially mixing sata and ide...
Sometimes it just a bit of dust across two tiny tabs in a slot intermittently shorting out a power-rail..

A couple of months ago I ran multiple installs of ubuntu 12, 14 and debian 8.2. I was surprised how well Ubuntu's grub read the installs and updated the boot options. It even read a debian back-port install which then listed the BPO as an additional boot-option for 8.2. i was impressed...

Im sure you'll be impressed too once this drive starts behaving...

Take your time, always plenty of time to do your family thing while the drives are low-level formatting...

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OK, much progress to report.

Arrived at my destination early evening and was able to sort the problem in a few minutes, so returned home and went to work on the problem computer. That was about 10:30 so did not see Robert's post which came a bit after I went to bed.

I disconnected the HDD and installed a different SSD. Here is a screenshot showing that SSD before I did anything.

See #1 below

Then installed U Mate 14.04 into that SSD. Ran like a champ. Played around with it for awhile to confirm all rosy. In retrospect, if I had been thinking, would have then reconnected the HDD and rebooted, to take this one element at a time in order to isolate what was causing the problem, but did not think of it at the time

Then leaving the questionable HDD still disconnected, replaced the new SSD with the problem SSD and deleted the sda1 using gparted in U Mate Live session.

Then deleted all other partitions except sda2 (with 12.04 on it). It did something which I don't understand.

See #2 below

It left the old sda1 as an unallocated space of 986MiB and showed the old sda3 and sda4 as a new unallocated space of 73.57GiB. Don't understand why it did not combine them?

Installed U Mate 14.04 from live desktop and rebooted. The grub menu came up with "Ubuntu" at the top and Ubuntu 12.04 at the bottom of the list. Selected the top choice and it booted into Ubuntu Mate 14.04 running well.

Then reconnected the HDD and booted up into the same old problem that I had been looking at for the last 3 weeks. It was the HDD mucking things up. I disconnected it and Ubuntu Mate is running well again. Here is current screenshot

See #3 below

So the old HDD is now on the RSN list to follow all of Robert's guidance as time permits.

There is however one new issue. I replaced the (SATA) ersatz 1T HDD with a 500GB SATA laptop HDD** that I had in my box of stuff intending to use it as my data repository (probably new thread soon about this). I can find it using the dropdown device box in the upper right hand corner of gparted, and under "Computer" in Places, but I cannot mount it.

See #4 below

What is keeping it from mounting? If this is not simple or for good practice, I can start a new thread, but I can imagine that the problem may be related to all that has transpired earlier in this thread.

**For Info: It is a Hitachi HTS545025B9A300 Travelstar 2.5-Inch 500GB 5400RPM SATA II 8 MB Cache Internal Hard Drive

Attached Thumbnails

       

Use GParted and select the 500GB drive from the drop down menu in the upper right. Do you see partitions or any filesystem on it or does it show as unallocated space? If it doesn't have a filesystem then it won't mount because there is nothing to mount.

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Need to make a small correction. It is a 250GB drive not 500.

It shows to be unallocated, so using gparted, I need to turn it into a 250 EXT4 partition. That did it.

Thanks to all the great suggestions and education you have all provided, I have lifted my level of confidence enormously and my competence in a few areas a goodly bit. And you have guided me through to the eventual resolution of what seemed an intractable problem, but just like almost every other problem, had a solution, and in this case an easy one if I had thought to try it early on.

I hope you wrote all the suggestions that worked down somewhere. It could save you a lot of time in the future.

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I have made so many notes that my next task is sorting them out.

I can't commend this enough.

I know it may make me sound quite anal, but any time I install a package and there is anything in the process that is non-default, I make a note of what I did in an always-to-hand master text file. The same goes for configuration, network setup, non-trivial tasks etc. It takes just a little of my time, but that file has come to the rescue so many times (and not only for me, for others I have helped too).

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Is this routine necessary with Windows or Mac OSX?

I don't quite get your question. I did the same with Windows, yes. I'm not going to remember every choice I made, every configuration command I issued. So, knowing that it's unlikely that I only ever do a thing just once, I keep notes.

That is Great News! Well done on being able to follow instructions and even more Well Done by getting the gist of things...

Pin assign the troublesom drive to "Slave", it prolly pinned Boot and is prolly what has been the prob' all along.... ...what was i thinking...1GB drives

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