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Thread: boot failure after big first post-install update. boot-repair created two ubuntus?!

  1. #1
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    boot failure after big first post-install update. boot-repair created two ubuntus?!

    After way too much hassle with UEFI settings I got ubuntu 12.04.2 LTS installed and working pretty well; multiple shut-downs and restarts without issue. Windows would not boot from grub2 (and still will not afaik), but it boots from UEFI/BIOS boot menu and that was fine for me for the time being. There was a problem where the grub2/splash screens would sometimes be very distorted, squished into the top 500 or so lines of the screen (making the text illegible), but it only occured intermittently and was always limited to those two screens (not the GUI) so it didn't bother me too much.

    I downloaded and installed ~210MB of recommended updates, VLC, Comix, and Steam (all in one session) and shut down (NOT 'restart and apply updates', just shut down; i felt i should switch UEFI/BIO boot order from windows8 to ubuntu first before proceeding?). The only thing that went wrong was I had to kill "Additional drivers" ("jockey"-something, which had been set to download a proper graphics driver) from system resources because I had to shut down and it was not responding (maybe just being slow, though). I didn't think this caused any problems, it certainly didn't at the time? This morning I try to start it back up and I get a failure to boot (windows can still boot just fine through UEFI/BIOS boot menu) reporting a number of problems(?);

    firstly right at the top it had:
    swapon: dev/disk/by-uuid/*long alphanumeric available on request*: swapon failed: Device or resource busy
    mountall: swapon *long alphanumeric available on request*[2760] terminated with status 255
    mountall: Problem activating swap: *long alphanumeric available on request*

    then a few other things i *think* were not so important (boot sector having a minor difference from backup it declined to automatically fix?), and then at a long list of modem-manager packages/drivers(?) it loaded, and then at the bottom:

    AppArmor skipping firefox and rsyslogd profiles, and speech-dispatcher and saned being disabled (i don't know what either of those two are but they sound like they could be important?)
    this screen ended immediately thereafter with a blinking cursor unresponsive to any key press. but just tapping the power button initiated a shut-down procedure with many commands flashing up.

    I booted the liveusb i had made (and am running to type this), downloaded installed and ran boot-repair (side question: how do i add this permanently? I should have 4gb of persistent space?) twice, because the first time i accidentally told it not to give me the url log (from second run: http://paste.ubuntu.com/5576462/), and then restarted. now the previously intermittent graphical distortion is constant (afaik through a few attempts), and boot still fails (i just now can't even read the screen it fails on...). Even worse(?) I now have two Ubuntu boot entries! I have no idea what i'm doing. The instructions on https://help.ubuntu.com/community/UEFI say I should now run boot-repair once more, but i am afriad, after it apparently made my situation so much worse!

    edit - update and clarification:

    i did decide to go ahead and run boot-repair again (http://paste.ubuntu.com/5576695), and then spent a while restarting and checking things out. It still does not boot, but the the error messages (which i am not even sure ARE error messages, or if they are just startup processes that hang?) have subtly changed (and seem to now be changing somewhat every time). but it always ends with the same messages about speech-dispatcher and saned being disabled, so i think that is my problem. except for the very first time i retried after boot-repair i got a new block of messages at the bottom which i think was just to do with error reporting;
    Code:
    Stopping System V initialization compatibility
    Starting System V runlevel compatibility
    Starting Auto Crash report
    (four more can post if needed, down to:)
    Starting anac(h)ronistic cron
    (four more, then:)
    Stopping anac(h)ronistic cron
    and then a hanging unresponsive cursor

    to clarify i have both a surplus Windows 8 and Ubuntu boot item, and they only appear in the UEFI/BIOS, not grub2.
    only one of these ubuntus presents to deformed graphics, the other is fine. i'm not sure if the 'fine' one is actually the old one that was experiencing it intermittently, or what? but it seems to be the one i am stuck with because the alternative is illegible.

    I am really tempted to just uninstall and reinstall from scratch at this point; I really want that TF2 hat and the clock is ticking!

    edit 2: some more research on 'ubuntu speech-dispatcher/saned disabled' and now i am thinking this may be a graphics driver failure, likely because of my impatient killing the process... which is strange because i was positive it hadn't even finished downloading. i have scribbled down the commands i need in a notebook, and now just have to hope the ctrl-alt-f1/f2 i saw somewhere (to unlock terminal once on 'ugly black screen') works... wish me luck!
    Last edited by emugod; March 3rd, 2013 at 05:19 PM. Reason: SOLVED

  2. #2
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    Re: boot failure after big first post-install update. boot-repair created two ubuntus

    Not sure what you are seeing. You only have one Windows install in sda5. But some systems create another partition with efi boot files which seem to be for recovery. You only can have one efi partition, so it may somehow change boot flag (which makes the efi partition the efi partition) from sda2 to sda3 for recovery. But Boot-Repair sees all the efi files and adds entries to boot them. It also copies as backup, the Windows boot file into the sda5 partition, but then may make an entry for it. And grub has a bug and its entries will not work. So only the Windows enties in grub menu refering to the efi partition sda2 should work. All the others will not boot Windows.

    You also have this extracted from UEFI. I do not understand why it shows two. Is one current & the other previous or two different choices in UEFI menu? Second shows boot 00004 which is ubuntu as default.

    Code:
     BootOrder: 0003,2001,0000,0000
    Boot0000* Lenovo Recovery System
    Boot0001* EFI Network 0 for IPv6 (B8-88-E3-7D-4A-3B)
    Boot0002* EFI Network 0 for IPv4 (B8-88-E3-7D-4A-3B)
    Boot0003* Windows Boot Manager
    Boot0006* EFI USB Device (USB 2.0 SD/MMC Reader)
    Boot2001* EFI USB Device
    BootCurrent: 0006
    Timeout: 2 seconds
    BootOrder: 0004,0003,2001,0000,0000
    Boot0000* Lenovo Recovery System
    Boot0001* EFI Network 0 for IPv6 (B8-88-E3-7D-4A-3B)
    Boot0002* EFI Network 0 for IPv4 (B8-88-E3-7D-4A-3B)
    Boot0003* Windows Boot Manager
    Boot0006* EFI USB Device (USB 2.0 SD/MMC Reader)
    Boot2001* EFI USB Device
    Boot0004* ubuntu
    These should work, others are to different UUIDs so not to efi partition.

    Code:
     /dev/sda2        54D2-9F55                              vfat       SYSTEM_DRV
    
    menuentry "Windows UEFI recovery bkpbootmgfw.efi" {
    search --fs-uuid --no-floppy --set=root 54D2-9F55
    chainloader (${root})/EFI/Microsoft/Boot/bkpbootmgfw.efi
    }
    
       menuentry "Windows Boot UEFI recovery" {
    search --fs-uuid --no-floppy --set=root 54D2-9F55
    chainloader (${root})/EFI/Boot/bkpbootx64.efi
    }
    I think having recovery in the title is a bug in Boot-Repair.
    This version includes Boot-Repair.
    https://help.ubuntu.com/community/UbuntuSecureRemix
    UEFI boot install & repair info - Regularly Updated :
    https://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2147295
    Please use Thread Tools above first post to change to [Solved] when/if answered completely.

  3. #3
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    Re: boot failure after big first post-install update. boot-repair created two ubuntus

    Thank you for your help oldfred, but sorry I couldn't get back in time to say; booting again! by disabling the graphics driver (in jockey-text), which apparently had been partially (corruptly) installed. Also sorry that most of what you wrote there is TOTALLY lost on me. I will try to clarify, though, and maybe you can make some sense of it;
    The 'extra' Windows8 and Ubuntu boot options did only appear this morning after I ran boot-repair, and only in the UEFI/BIOS, not grub. they are named exactly the same, but the Ubuntu ones show very clear differences in that only one produces the corrupted graphics I described. I'm not sure if I've actually tried either of the Windows8 ones yet.. don't want to even think about any potential problems there. Aside from that all I can offer is that I have known from the start this laptop came pre-loaded with a lot of funky partitions; two windows recovery and two lenovo recovery partitions, plus two other small partitions of unknown purpose or effect (i am 99% sure one of them is just empty... not going to test it, for the relatively small amount of space). I have already shrunk the major lenovo one way down; it just holds some backup drivers totaling ~1.5gb iirc, but came set to use 30gb!

    now i will be gone for a while again, using liveusb partition expansion utility to free up more space (i am just a few gigs short of what I need for tf2, plus i'd of course like to have some extra over that as well) This may require a trip back into windows to uninstall some stuff there (lenovo = bloatware, most of which i've never bothered to uninstall), so i may be able to confirm which of the two windows8 boot options work.

  4. #4
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    Re: boot failure after big first post-install update. boot-repair created two ubuntus

    Do not delete any Windows partitons. For example it has the MSR or Microsoft reserved. That is totally unformatted space which I believe it uses for DRM - Digital Rights Management or other purposes. In MBR it used to use the sectors after the MBR and sometimes we had conflicts with DRM and grub2's core.img.

    With 12.10 we had to install the headers to get the video drivers to install correctly. It should update, but I have seen several posts with issues and it seems the new kernel does not automatically intregrate the kernel & video drivers. Did you install nVidia or AMD drivers?
    UEFI boot install & repair info - Regularly Updated :
    https://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2147295
    Please use Thread Tools above first post to change to [Solved] when/if answered completely.

  5. #5
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    Re: boot failure after big first post-install update. boot-repair created two ubuntus

    What if one did delete the Windows partitions, as I did?

  6. #6
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    Re: boot failure after big first post-install update. boot-repair created two ubuntus

    Quote Originally Posted by oldfred View Post
    Do not delete any Windows partitons. For example it has the MSR or Microsoft reserved. That is totally unformatted space which I believe it uses for DRM - Digital Rights Management or other purposes. In MBR it used to use the sectors after the MBR and sometimes we had conflicts with DRM and grub2's core.img.
    Yeah something crazy like that is what i figured, and why I have never touched it. Will continue my hands-off policy.

    Quote Originally Posted by oldfred View Post
    With 12.10 we had to install the headers to get the video drivers to install correctly. It should update, but I have seen several posts with issues and it seems the new kernel does not automatically intregrate the kernel & video drivers.
    I didn't get any of that, but I'll remember to recheck this post later when i even do get to really worrying about it (although actually playing it on Linux is also definitely a goal, launching tf2 to get the tux canteen has a deadline attached). Thanks in advance.

    Quote Originally Posted by oldfred View Post
    Did you install nVidia or AMD drivers?
    It's an AMD Radeon 6310 jockey-reccomended stable version, and I can now confirm it just plain doesn't work . After reinstalling it (with patience this time), it still produces the same result. Currently on my liveusb waiting for GParted to finish, and then I will run a bootrepair just to be safe. And then go through the hassle of disabling the driver through terminal again... and if i'm interpreting your post right, it sounds like just trying the eperimental version probably won't get any better results. could you elaborate a little more on installing headers and inegrating the driver/kernel?

    edit:
    What I am really interested in at this moment is how do I work with the supposed persistent element of my LiveUSB? this is the third time I have reinstalled boot-repair TODAY, it would be real nice to just have it. And to be able to customize the environment, store logins/history/bookmarks for firefox, maybe even add steam+GMS+project copy right to this drive if i have the space. etc.
    Last edited by emugod; March 1st, 2013 at 08:44 PM.

  7. #7
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    Re: boot failure after big first post-install update. boot-repair created two ubuntus

    If you have the secure remix then that includes Boot-Repair.

    I think you just add persistent and maybe another partition.
    https://help.ubuntu.com/community/LiveCD/Persistence
    https://wiki.ubuntu.com/LiveUsbPendrivePersistent

    With grub2 persistent C.S.Cameron 12.04
    http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2042965

    Large persistent - C.S.Cameron post 6 & 7
    http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2041679

    @WesternRyno
    Did you backup before install. Do you also erase the vendor recovery. If so the only remaining alternative is to order a new DVD set from Vendor. Some only charge a nominal shipping fee.
    Last edited by oldfred; March 1st, 2013 at 08:58 PM.
    UEFI boot install & repair info - Regularly Updated :
    https://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2147295
    Please use Thread Tools above first post to change to [Solved] when/if answered completely.

  8. #8
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    Re: boot failure after big first post-install update. boot-repair created two ubuntus

    @Oldfred Ok, this is what I thought. I'm ok wiping it, just wanted to make sure there aren't any hidden surprises from having done so. Sorry to hijack this thread.

  9. #9
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    Re: boot failure after big first post-install update. boot-repair created two ubuntus



    now to actually get it to run, instead of freezing at the load screen. OldFred would you care to elaborate any more about the driver issue?

  10. #10
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    Re: boot failure after big first post-install update. boot-repair created two ubuntus

    I do not know much about Video drivers other than my nVidia.

    # You may need headers first - meta package for 12.10 version:
    sudo apt-get install linux-headers-generic


    Update does not rebuild the video kernel interface 3.2.0-38 - and others?
    https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+s...x/+bug/1132092

    Graphics Resolution- Upgrade /Blank Screen after reboot mega thread - MAFoElffen
    http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1743535


    https://wiki.ubuntu.com/X/Troublesho...riverDetection
    Ubuntu Precise Installation Guide - AMD/ATI
    http://wiki.cchtml.com/index.php/Ubu...#Video_Tearing
    Add Hardware Graphics - ATI: After installing ATI Driver: From QIII
    http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2050320
    UEFI boot install & repair info - Regularly Updated :
    https://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2147295
    Please use Thread Tools above first post to change to [Solved] when/if answered completely.

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