booting problems with Ubuntu 12.04

[tedr108]

Woohoo!!!! I hope...

OK, ran the Ubuntu 12.04 Live CD again and double checked Gparted. The / and /home labels were not showing up on their respective partitions, so I re-entered them and shut down and rebooted. I just shut down and restarted 3 times in a row ... it succeeded each time!

Now, I will say that a "restart" does not work ... it locks up on the purple screen. However, a complete shut down and start has been working.

Thanks to all who helped me out ... (and those who were silently giving me moral support behind the scenes!)

(P.S.) Reboot appears to be working now, too.

[YannBuntu]

The partitions look good except that 1Mb "bios_grub" (or whatever) partition at the beginning is unknown format.

I think it's normal. (the BIOS-Boot partition must have no filesystem, see https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Di...n_GPT_disks.29 )

If you are not sure, I think it is easier to:
1) use Gparted to just format the disk in GPT (create no partition)
2) let the Ubuntu installer create all partitions (including the BIOS-Boot one) for you, by choosing the "Install Ubuntu on the entire disk" option.

[tedr108]

I think it's normal. (the BIOS-Boot partition must have no filesystem, see https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Di...n_GPT_disks.29 )

If you are not sure, I think it is easier to:
1) use Gparted to just format the disk in GPT (create no partition)
2) let the Ubuntu installer create all partitions (including the BIOS-Boot one) for you, by choosing the "Install Ubuntu on the entire disk" option.

Thanks, I'll probably just do that next time ... would have saved me a ton of trouble. The only reason I partition myself is so that I can make a big swap (2.5x RAM, which is overkill, I'm sure) and a big /root folder (25GB). I do occasionally compile Android ROMs, which can take a long, long time, so I thought a big swap might help. It would be interesting to see what the automatic partitioning comes up with.

After all was said and done, I now know the 2 main things I did wrong: 1) did not included the "bios_grub" partition at the beginning and 2) did not have the disk formatted GPT. I'm pretty sure that #1 was the killer. This was my first experience with an EFI setup ... had to learn some things the hard way.

That's a great link you sent me, by the way. Not sure how I missed that one in all my research...

[tedr108]

Sorry to drag this up again, but thought this was worth noting...

Although some of the things I did to get my Ubuntu 12.04 up and running helped with stability in booting, I finally figured out the real problem:

I was formatting the boot partition as ext2, rather than ext4. Not good! Once I found out that it should be ext4, no failed boots ever ... not even with msdos, rather than gpt, formatting.

Too bad I did not mention the ext2 formatting in the OP, I'm sure a number of you would have caught that right off. Not sure when that started to be an issue ... always had ext2 on past PCs/laptops, even with 12.04, and never had problems.

Also, from what I read, it seems that I could not do a pure EFI boot because even Win7 requires some legacy stuff. So, I think my Ubuntu is probably booting Legacy, rather than EFI, but not sure. Don't really care at this point. My Ubuntu is booting very quickly.

Thanks for all the help.