12.10 unable to boot properly in dual boot

[oyoyoy]

Yesterday I installed Ubuntu 12.10 (64-bit) alongside win7 on my laptop. Both sitting on a single 120gb ssd disk. The install went seemingly flawless.

Upon finishing the installation I did a (forced) reboot. Np, Ubuntu started fine. I expected several missing driver issues and whatnot, but everything was working (afaik) out of the box. Even my bluetooth mouse was a walk in the park to get up and running. I then rebooted into win7 and after doing the disk checks it always does following the installation of a second os next to it, win7 booted with no issues as well.

The problems started when I then wanted to reboot back into Ubuntu. The grub bootloader came up as usual, but having chosen Ubuntu the screen flickered a few times then stopped on a grey screen. I turned off the laptop and repeated this a couple of times with the exact same result. On my 3rd or 4th attempt I was somehow able to boot and immediately installed and ran boot-repair.

Inside boot-repair I chose the "automatically-fix-it" button which made it do stuff (said so on screen), but please don't ask me what... Upon finishing it came up with a pop-up where it asked me to write down on a piece of paper this:

http://paste.ubuntu.com/1288002/

It also warned me that my boot files are located too far from the start of the disk. It should be below 200mb from the start of the disk. The Ubuntu partition is the last 40gb of a 120gb ssd disk afaik. I have no idea where the installation placed my boot files. I somehow imagined it would put them in a sensible place... I made no custom adjustments during the install. I just followed all the default options offered by the installer.

Boot-repair suggest I use gparted to solve this issue. Having searched and read up on gparted I'm not particularly comfortable using the program. Is there someone able to point me to an idiot's guide to using gparted (or another suited program) to move my boot files to where they belong?

Also... is this indeed the (only) problem causing my laptop's boot problems? I have rebooted my laptop over and over and it still only boots on approx. every 4th attempt. Boot-repair made no difference (noticeable to me).

I'm very unsure what kind of info I should present to help you help me. Please just state so if you want me to provide more info on my hardware/set-up.

I know the installation of both os's was made in bios, not uefi-mode. For whatever that is worth.

Oy

[oldfred]

Not sure that it is the error reported by Boot-Repair. We have seen that error on some systems with very large / (root) partitions. Particularly those over 500GB with some grub or kernel files at the start and some beyond 600GB on drive. Yann set the error report to 100GB as everytime the root partition was fully inside that it worked. It also may be BIOS issues as well. I would discount that error for now if you can at least boot some of the time.

What mode is BIOS in. With an SSD it needs to be AHCI to work with SSD and implement trim correctly.

Lots of detail on SSD.
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Solid_State_Drives

Booting some of time is harder to analyze.

Try removing quiet splash from grub menu.Use e on menu and edit linux line. You may see issue where it stops, but it does not always stop on the issue. Same lines are in logs.

You can also look in logs. Use Log File Viewer. Files are in /var/log. I look in dmesg first. And look for repeated entries that try and then fail or are just errors that are skipped. It may take comparing one that works with one that does not. It has start times and time for each task shown.

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/LinuxLogFiles

[oyoyoy]

Thanks for the help. I installed gparted and my disk looks like this:



To me this looks like my boot files are indeed situated within the first 100mb of the disk. Correct? I have spent a lot of time researching how to create a new partition to move my boot files to. That did seem rather complicated, so I'm happy if it's not needed... The bios mode is AHCI. I made sure of that before installing the ssd-disk.

I noticed that boot-repair made a 2nd entry for windows in my grub-menu. I now have the choice of loading windows in sda1 or sda2. No idea what that is about. Which one should I use?

Try removing quiet splash from grub menu.Use e on menu and edit linux line.

I'm sorry, but I do not understand how to do this. I will proceed to look at the logs to see if I can identify the problem. Gotta get my laptop up and running then...

Oy

[oldfred]

Windows 7 has a separate hidden 100MB boot/repair partition, your sda1. Boot repair usually copies key boot files from boot to main, so just in case of issues you can boot the main partition directly. You can use either. From sda1 you may be able to press f8 and get into Windows repairs but many have said you have to be really quick as from grub to Windows booting is quick. Better to have a repairCD anyway.

Boot script reported this, so you are just over 100, but if able to boot again it is not the main issue.

=================== sda5: Location of files loaded by Grub: ====================

           GiB - GB             File                                 Fragment(s)

 100.807662964 = 108.241403904  boot/grub/grub.cfg                             1
  95.415550232 = 102.451666944  boot/initrd.img-3.5.0-17-generic               1
  96.879447937 = 104.023515136  boot/vmlinuz-3.5.0-17-generic                  1
  95.415550232 = 102.451666944  initrd.img                                     1
  95.415550232 = 102.451666944  initrd.img.old                                 1
  96.879447937 = 104.023515136  vmlinuz                                        1

From grub menu. Press e for edit. Then edit the line that starts with linux to remove quiet splash. Then control-x or f10 to boot. It has basic instructions when in the edit mode.

[oyoyoy]

I attempted to boot into Ubuntu 5 times unsuccessfully. I tried pressing e once and it brought me to another screen, but I did not figure out how to edit it correctly so I just booted using f10. I'll give it another try.

In the end I booted on a live usb and looked at the dmesg log. There's like a 1000 lines in that log and lots of entries reporting what would seem like errors (?). Is there something in particular I should be looking for?

Oy

[oyoyoy]

I removed the quiet splash part and hit f10. Didn't seem to make a difference. I then removed quiet splash + the svt_handsomething part after it before hitting f10. That made it successfully boot into Ubuntu. Which could be random ofc. I expected to see text on the screen giving me some kind an idea what was going on, but there was only a brief flash of a few lines of text during boot-up.

Would looking at the dmesg log tell you anything?

https://dl.dropbox.com/u/29535452/dmesg

I'm quite clueless what to look for. It says;

[ 5.009385] microcode: failed to load file amd-ucode/microcode_amd.bin

at the end. Significant?

Oy

[oldfred]

Not familiar with that error. But I do not see much else that stands out. Others may know more.

I found this on the Arch site. Do not know if Ubuntu has similar extra amd ucode to download. pacman is Arch version of repository software like apt-get.

https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=144699

This user just reinstalled.
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2073233

May be related?
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+s...2/+bug/1055096

[NikTh]

Hi ,

from your dmesg report , I can see multiple errors and warnings

[    0.455647]  pci0000:00: >ACPI _OSC request failed (AE_NOT_FOUND), returned control mask: 0x1d 
[    2.156071] EXT4-fs (sda5): orphan cleanup on readonly fs 
[    2.156102] EXT4-fs (sda5): ext4_orphan_cleanup: deleting unreferenced inode 395191 
[    2.156278] EXT4-fs (sda5): ext4_orphan_cleanup: deleting unreferenced inode 395209 
[    2.156317] EXT4-fs (sda5): ext4_orphan_cleanup: deleting unreferenced inode 395101 
[    2.156379] EXT4-fs (sda5): ext4_orphan_cleanup: deleting unreferenced inode 393311 
[    2.156418] EXT4-fs (sda5): ext4_orphan_cleanup: deleting unreferenced inode 393491 
[    2.156440] EXT4-fs (sda5): ext4_orphan_cleanup: deleting unreferenced inode 393496 
[    2.156478] EXT4-fs (sda5): ext4_orphan_cleanup: deleting unreferenced inode 393357 
[    2.156515] EXT4-fs (sda5): ext4_orphan_cleanup: deleting unreferenced inode 393307 
[    2.156551] EXT4-fs (sda5): ext4_orphan_cleanup: deleting unreferenced inode 394396 
[    3.218804] ACPI Warning: _BQC returned an invalid level (20120320/video-480) 
[    5.009385] microcode: failed to load file amd-ucode/microcode_amd.bin

Most of them are related to the filesystem. So try to repair the filesystem in /dev/sda5.

Boot from liveCd and apply bellow command to a terminal

sudo e2fsck -f -p -v /dev/sda5

Then with the filesystem repaired , run again the boot-repair program and finally reboot.
Thanks

[oyoyoy]

Thanks for the help! I did what you suggested and this was the rather uneventful result:


(Edit: Fixed the screenshot, cropping courtesy of http://www.sumopaint.com/app/)

I then ran boot-repair producing this:

http://paste.ubuntu.com/1292852/

I then managed to boot into Ubuntu on my first attempt. I guess it's a bit early to celebrate success quite yet. I will proceed to reboot a few times to see what happens.

Are there indications of any more irregularities in the boot-repair report? It did not warn about anything apart from once again claiming my boot files are situated too far from the start of the disc.

Oy

[oldfred]

It looks like it tried to upgrade Boot-Repair and could not get to that repository. Not a big issue.

But if an SSD, it does not look like you have customized the settings in fstab, & maybe others to run with a SSD correctly. Arch site has lots of detail.

Have you changed BIOS to AHCI if not already. You may have to install drivers into Windows 7 first if not already there.

Do SSD need customization?
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1981478
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Solid_State_Drives
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2003022