8.04 Installation Troubles

[melenor]

I was finally able to fix mine, it was my hard drive, my old copy of ubuntu was corrupted and even with the drive plugged ubuntu would not boot, so i unplugged it, booted into liveCD and plugged back in the old drive an deleted the old ubuntu partition and i continued form there.

[melenor]

Sorry for the double post. Try these one at a time, i found my answer here.
* unpluggging one of your hard drives one at a time
* try unplugging one of your RAM sticks.
* if you have an extra PSU try that one.
* try deleteing, or reformatting the drive, or scanning the drive

[antonwalker]

I got it to install, and I had a lot of problems getting the NVIDIA drivers working. Sometimes when I boot up they will and sometimes they wont. Its really annoying after a few times they will work and I can do compiz awesomeness...

[hoozey]

The upgrading process seemed to go fine, but then after I rebooted at its conclusion I found that my box hangs on startup and just grinds through a series of cryptic error messages I've never seen before that I suspect having something to do with my harddrive. They read like the following, with ever increasing numbers in the left hand bracket. (Please forgive any typos as I am reproducing this by hand on my laptop)

[ 427.106648] ata2.00: exception Emask 0x0 SAct 0x0 Serr 0x0 action 0x2 frozen
[ 427.106648] ata2.00: cmd a0/00:00:00:24:0/00:00:00:00:00:00:00/a0 tag 0 pio 36 in
[ 427.106648] ata2.00: status { DRDY }
...
[ 583.564700] ata2.00: exception Emask 0x0 SAct 0x0 Serr 0x0 action 0x2 frozen
[ 583.564700] ata2.00: cmd a0/00:00:00:24:0/00:00:00:00:00:00:00/a0 tag 0 pio 36 in
[ 583.564700] ata2.00: status { DRDY }

Anybody know what's up with that? I worry that it means something is wrong with my hardware, but I never had any problems until this upgrade...and the box is only a month or two old.

Anybody have any idea what's up with this stuff and what I can do? Any Dell Ubuntu users experience similar problems?

I also have an ubuntu dell. I tried to do a fresh install of 8.04 but I couldn't boot because I kept getting the busybox error. So in the BIOS I changed the sata mode from ide to raid and was able to boot from the cd. But I also have XP on another partition and it wouldn't boot with this changed setting, so after I installed ubuntu I changed it back to ide.
This fixed XP, but now when trying to boot ubuntu I get the errors perchance describes. So depending on the sata mode setting, I can either boot ubuntu or XP, but not both. I also tried a 7.10 install followed by an upgrade, but no luck.

perchance, if you don't need to dual boot, I'm willing to bet my boots that your problem will be fixed by changing the sata settings in the BIOS from IDE to RAID.

Anyone have any ideas how I can fix this? I really don't want to have to change my BIOS settings every time I have to switch between XP and ubuntu.

EDIT: I was able to fix this by leaving the sata mode on IDE and using the all_generic_ide startup option. Check out Aearenda's post in this thread for how to do it.

hoozey