Trouble installing 7.10
 

Hi, Guys,

I downloaded the iso for Kubuntu Gutsy 7.10 to update my Dapper 6.06
systems and burned the CD using k3b. Spent an hour trying to get
that working0 and then downloaded another iso from another mirror and
got the same result.

Time to read the README; it talks about SMB, a smart loader for floppy
disks. I cursed a while then went to another machine that has a
floppy drive, booted into Dapper and did a

sudo dd if=SMB.bin of=/mnt/floppy/SMB.bin

Machine says it's a non-system disk.

How do I make the floppy into a system disk?

bruce

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Trouble installing 7.10
 

On Sunday 18 November 2007 13:45, Bruce Bales wrote:
> Hi, Guys,
>
> I downloaded the iso for Kubuntu Gutsy 7.10 to update my Dapper
> 6.06 systems and burned the CD using k3b. Spent an hour trying to
> get that working0 and then downloaded another iso from another
> mirror and got the same result.
>
> Time to read the README; it talks about SMB, a smart loader for
> floppy disks. I cursed a while then went to another machine that
> has a floppy drive, booted into Dapper and did a
>
> sudo dd if=SMB.bin of=/mnt/floppy/SMB.bin
>
> Machine says it's a non-system disk.
>
> How do I make the floppy into a system disk?
>
> bruce

Oops: I meant to say sbm up above, not smb.
bruce

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Trouble installing 7.10
 

Bruce Bales said the following at 11/18/2007 12:45 PM :
> Hi, Guys,
>
> I downloaded the iso for Kubuntu Gutsy 7.10 to update my Dapper 6.06
> systems and burned the CD using k3b. Spent an hour trying to get
> that working0 and then downloaded another iso from another mirror and
> got the same result.
>

What do you mean when you say that you spent an hour "trying to get that
working"? What didn't work:
Didn't it boot?
Did it fail during the installation?
Did it install fine but fail to boot afterwards?

Please give us more information. I for one can't even guess what part of
the process failed, so I have no idea how to suggest you go about fixing it.

Doc


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Trouble installing 7.10
 

On Sunday 18 November 2007 16:03, D. R. Evans wrote:
> Bruce Bales said the following at 11/18/2007 12:45 PM :
> > Hi, Guys,
> >
> > I downloaded the iso for Kubuntu Gutsy 7.10 to update my Dapper
> > 6.06 systems and burned the CD using k3b. Spent an hour trying
> > to get that working0 and then downloaded another iso from another
> > mirror and got the same result.
>
> What do you mean when you say that you spent an hour "trying to get
> that working"? What didn't work:
> Didn't it boot?
> Did it fail during the installation?
> Did it install fine but fail to boot afterwards?
>
> Please give us more information. I for one can't even guess what
> part of the process failed, so I have no idea how to suggest you go
> about fixing it.
>
> Doc
Thanks for answering, Doc.

I put the CD in the drive and turned on power. It read for a while
and flashed some words across the top of the screen, then deleted
them before I could read them. After a short time the Kubuntu icon
appeared and the 'Loading' bar started moving back and forth.

Soon the icon and loading bar disappeared and two lines of text came
up with a mixture of hex and text with the word "error" in it, but
nothing helpful or even understandable. Another line said something
about busy-box being installed and ' ... type help for list of
commands."

None of the commands proved to be useful (that's where most of the
hour went).

The indecipherable line was repeated several times at 32 second
intervals. I decided the disk was bad and downloaded another from a
different mirror and burned another CD. Same result.

I got on another machine and looked at the CD -- then read the README
file, where I discovered I might need to build a boot flex (we might
discuss the wisdom of going back to an obsolete technology later). I
dug down in the bottom of a cabinet and found a flex disk and tried
the sudo dd if=SMB.bin of=/mnt/floppy/SBM.bin

The machine didn't like the floppy -- "non-system disk" Made another
with the same result. Tried the floppy in another machine with same
result.

So I'm stuck. Maybe if I can get the flex to work I'll be able to
make some progress.
bruce


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Trouble installing 7.10
 

Bruce,
A few things come to my mind:
1. Bad CD -- Did you check the md5sum and verify the burned iso after you cut
it?
2. Is your CD drive poked? (that's busted in South Africanese :) )
3. Does another CD for some other o/s boot?
4. Then I'd visit the BIOS and see what I can see.

So, before you go down the floopy disk road -- and I can't recall the last
time I used one! -- give those a whirl.


/d

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Trouble installing 7.10
 

Donn said the following at 11/18/2007 09:20 PM :

> A few things come to my mind:
> 1. Bad CD -- Did you check the md5sum and verify the burned iso after you cut
> it?
> 2. Is your CD drive poked? (that's busted in South Africanese :) )
> 3. Does another CD for some other o/s boot?
> 4. Then I'd visit the BIOS and see what I can see.
>
> So, before you go down the floopy disk road -- and I can't recall the last
> time I used one! -- give those a whirl.

Also, were you using the regular install CD or the alternative one? If you
were using the regular one, I would try the alternative one, because that
one seems to be much better at detecting and handling various pieces of
hardware.

Doc

PS I have seen something like what you're seeing (although not when using
the downloaded CD) if the new system of addressing devices by ID instead of
name gets somehow mysteriously broken. Was one of the error messages saying
that it couldn't find your hard drive?

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Trouble installing 7.10
 

On Monday 19 November 2007 10:15, D. R. Evans wrote:
> Donn said the following at 11/18/2007 09:20 PM :
> > A few things come to my mind:
> > 1. Bad CD -- Did you check the md5sum and verify the burned iso
> > after you cut it?
> > 2. Is your CD drive poked? (that's busted in South Africanese :)
> > ) 3. Does another CD for some other o/s boot?
> > 4. Then I'd visit the BIOS and see what I can see.
> >
> > So, before you go down the floopy disk road -- and I can't recall
> > the last time I used one! -- give those a whirl.
>
> Also, were you using the regular install CD or the alternative one?
> If you were using the regular one, I would try the alternative one,
> because that one seems to be much better at detecting and handling
> various pieces of hardware.
>
> Doc
>
> PS I have seen something like what you're seeing (although not when
> using the downloaded CD) if the new system of addressing devices by
> ID instead of name gets somehow mysteriously broken. Was one of the
> error messages saying that it couldn't find your hard drive?

Thanks, Doc.

I tried the CD in a newer machine and it booted and played just right.

The Dapper CD works just fine in the problem machine.

Can't see anything in the bios. Floppy is first load device, CD is
second. And the CD does load -- at least partially.

The complete series of results is

First, the Kubuntu logo and a list of "Install, Run, Check CD, etc."
I pick one and get a message that shows for one second that
contains " ... acpi fails ...."
next I see:
busybox v1.1.3 (Debian 1:1.1.3-5ubuntu7) Built-in shell (ash)
Enter 'help' for a list of built-in commands.

(initramfs) [ 97.620409] ata1.00: exception Emask 0x0 SAct 0x0 SErr
0x0 action 0x2 frozen
[ 97.620490] ata1.00: cmd c8/00:08:00:00:00:/00:00:00:00:00:/e0 tag 0
cdb 0x12 data 4096 in
[ 130.140619] ata1.00: exception Emask 0x0 SAct 0x0 SErr 0x0 action
0x2 frozen
[ 130.140619] ata1.00: cmd c8/00:08:00:00:00:/00:00:00:00:00:/e0 tag
0 cdb 0x12 data 4096 in

[ 195.181153] ata1.00: exception Emask 0x0 SAct 0x0 SErr 0x0 action
0x2 frozen
[ 195.181153] ata1.00: cmd c8/00:08:00:00:00:/00:00:00:00:00:/e0 tag
0 cdb 0x12 data 4096 in

(initramfs)

"help" brings a list like
. : alias break cd chdir command continue etc.

NOTE:
Opening the CD under Dapper, one file on the CD is named README.sbm
and contains the following:

About the Smart Boot Manager image

The file `sbm.bin' that is available in this directory may be useful
to you if you are not able to directly boot the first CD because
your BIOS may be too old and may not support ISOLINUX.

Then, instead of booting on the CD directly, you create a Smart Boot
Manager floppy image by using the sbm.bin disk image. You can create
this floppy with rawrite (under DOS) or with dd (under Linux). Now
you can boot on this floppy disk and it will detect your CDROM and
let you boot on it bypassing any BIOS limitation.

What is SBM ?

Smart Boot Manager or briefly SmartBtmgr (SBM), is an OS independent
Boot Manager - a program that is loaded by the bios before any
operating system and allows you to choose which operating system to
boot.

SBM is included in Debian in two ways, the package bmconf allows us
to install and configure an old version of SBM and sbm wich is the
latest version of SBM with an installer.

What's the use of SBM on the CD then ?

What's the use of SBM on the CD then ?

SBM includes an IDE driver that allows us to boot the cds even on
machines with a BIOS that wouldn't support booting from CD, provided
our CDROM is an IDE one, that is, so you can make a SBM floppy and
boot from it and then tell it to boot from your CDROM.

Also, there are some cases where the BIOS would allow booting from
the CD but isolinux fails to boot from there, in this case you can
either boot using a CD other than the first, as the others don't use
isolinux, or you can make a SBM floppy and boot from this floppy and
then tell SBM to boot your CDROM.

How do you make a SBM floppy ?

If you have SBM installed on a box you can run sbminst. Otherwise
you can put the sbm.bin floppy image that we provide with our cds
onto a floppy just like you would do with a rescue image.
(END)

That last paragraph made me think I could install sbm on the machine
and sbminst would make a floppy boot disk. It did write something on
the floppy, but the results were just the same (except it takes
longer).

COMMENT:
I have been using Linux for eight years; exclusively for six or seven
years. I have installed various versions and distributions perhaps
30 times. I greatly appreciate what the developers have provided me.
There have been great improvements in these years. Kubuntu is by far
the best. Would I give this CD to a typical Windows user and let him
install it? Hardly.
bruce


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Trouble installing 7.10
 

Bruce Bales wrote:

> The complete series of results is
>
> First, the Kubuntu logo and a list of "Install, Run, Check CD, etc."
> I pick one and get a message that shows for one second that
> contains " ... acpi fails ...."

Try booting the cd with the kernel option 'noacpi'.
See https://help.ubuntu.com/community/BootOptions

hth,
Karl

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Trouble installing 7.10
 

Bruce Bales said the following at 11/19/2007 01:48 PM :

>
> I tried the CD in a newer machine and it booted and played just right.
>
> The Dapper CD works just fine in the problem machine.
>

Neither of these causes me to alter my suggestion :-) The "alternative" CD
will work on machines that the ordinary CD won't. And there have been
enough changes between dapper and gutsy that I don't think one can read
anything into the fact that the dapper CD worked.

> Can't see anything in the bios. Floppy is first load device, CD is
> second. And the CD does load -- at least partially.
>
> The complete series of results is
>
> First, the Kubuntu logo and a list of "Install, Run, Check CD, etc."
> I pick one and get a message that shows for one second that
> contains " ... acpi fails ...."

I can't say I've ever seen anything quite like that.

So you're saying that you get this even if you choose "Run" or "Check CD"?

That seems like it can only mean that the OS on the CD can't access the CD
drive properly. Which makes me even more suspicious that you should try the
alternative CD and probably try messing with the boot options.


> next I see:
> busybox v1.1.3 (Debian 1:1.1.3-5ubuntu7) Built-in shell (ash)
> Enter 'help' for a list of built-in commands.
>

Yes. Been there :-) The busybox stuff is useful if you get boot failures
once the system is installed; but in your case, since it's happening off
the OS CD, I don't think it's a useful place to leave you :-(

>
> The file `sbm.bin' that is available in this directory may be useful
> to you if you are not able to directly boot the first CD because
> your BIOS may be too old and may not support ISOLINUX.

Unlikely, since dapper works. In fact, so unlikely that personally I
wouldn't even think about spending the time on this (although of course you
might think differently). I am close-to-certain that you'd just end up in
the same place you are now.

>
> COMMENT:
> I have been using Linux for eight years; exclusively for six or seven
> years. I have installed various versions and distributions perhaps
> 30 times. I greatly appreciate what the developers have provided me.
> There have been great improvements in these years. Kubuntu is by far
> the best. Would I give this CD to a typical Windows user and let him
> install it? Hardly.

My comment:

Yep. I agree that Kubuntu is the best to use. But *in my experience*
installation and upgrading is still too likely to fail. I too would not
hand a Kubuntu CD to a novice. A Mandriva 2008 CD, maybe. The end result
isn't as good as Kubuntu (and -- again in my experience -- the support
plain sucks in comparison to Kubuntu), but they could probably install it OK.

Doc



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Trouble installing 7.10
 

Karl said the following at 11/19/2007 02:53 PM :
> Bruce Bales wrote:
>
>> The complete series of results is
>>
>> First, the Kubuntu logo and a list of "Install, Run, Check CD, etc."
>> I pick one and get a message that shows for one second that
>> contains " ... acpi fails ...."
>
> Try booting the cd with the kernel option 'noacpi'.
> See https://help.ubuntu.com/community/BootOptions

I didn't realise that you could get to the boot options from the Live CD.
That was part of my rationale for suggesting the alternative CD, because I
thought I had read somewhere (maybe for an older version of Ubuntu) that if
one wanted to change the boot options, one had to use the alternative CD.
Or maybe I'm just hallucinating.

Anyway, given that you can do this, I agree (loudly) that this is the thing
to try.

Doc


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