Hardware :: Pentium 4 Machine Does Not Boot Past VGA BIOS
Jul 1, 2011
I recently obtained a built machine that has an Intel motherboard. The computer had Windows XP on it, but the owner wanted me to format it completely before I started using it. Nbd, I just used a gparted live cd and formatted the 200gb Seagate it came with.
Well now, I think the drive is dead or something, because whatever machine I put it in, it doesn't boot.
So, being out the 200gb drive I was hoping to use, I just threw in a spare drive I had laying around. (This is isn't the point of this thread.)I planned to use the machine as a basic server, so I made a Debian install CD and just let the installer run (completing the appropriate prompts). However, usually towards the end of the installation, the machine completely kills itself. It just randomly shuts off. No message about it, just, "Click!" and the machine's dead. I know the installation doesn't complete, I've used the CD on other machines, and Debian will tell you that it's finished and getting your consent before turning off.
Upon trying to reboot the machine, after a few seconds of POST messages, it kills itself again. And again. What I've figured out is pressing the reset button a few times during boot usually gets to go eventually. I swapped the power supply out, but that didn't make a difference. I've tried different RAM. I swapped out the CMOS battery. Nothing seems to be working.. As of right now, it does not kill itself, but it will turn on and immediately it hangs on a a screen that says Nvidia Vanta VGA BIOS and some other video card info. After it started doing this is when I changed the CMOS battery.
The board is older, an Intel D845BG. The first power supply was 300w, as was the second. I also tried a 250w one with no results. The standby light on the motherboard does go on as soon as it gets power. I tried a different video card, just as a "why not?", and the machine still didn't boot, however that first POST line changed to 3D Prophet II, etc. or the name of the video and it reflected the change in video memory.
I've had FC11 x86_64 running for awhile based on an upgrade from FC10. I powered down one night then when I tried to boot the next day the system just sat at the BIOS prompt "Verifying DMI pool data...". I opened the case to check all cables - all fine. I've run a memtest, also fine. I then suspected a bad HDD so I ran the Seagate tools from the Ultimate Boot CD (fast test) and both HDDs came up fine. BIOS can see both disks fine, too. I stuffed around with fixmbr and fixboot and got one step further, with it sitting at "invalid operating system" or something like that. I was able to use Linux rescue mode to mount the old filesystems fine.
Today I've completely blown away all my old partitions and started from scratch. After successfully completing an install with custom disk layout (identical to old layout) it still just sits at "Verifying DMI pool data..". Do I have a bad sector in my boot block? Possible BIOS issue? Is there some tool to re-write the boot block?
I recently bought a video card for my pc. I had it running pretty nicely on Ubuntu10.10, I started windows and later restarted and after that it wouldn't get past the Graphic cards bios. this is rather odd isn't it? I suspect it maybe dead or that my motherboard bios is stuffed but i reset that too and it still wont go.. The specs are Pentium4 Proccesor 1gb ram motherboard 661gx-m7 Nvidia GeForce FX5200 DDr128mb
I have a Fedora 11 PC, which I want to connect to the ldap server at my organisation. When my /etc/ldap.conf file is in place, the machine will not boot past "starting system messagebus" and just hangs there. I have to press the reset button, and boot it into single user mode, and remove /etc/ldap.conf, and only then will it boot. The ldap.conf file is fine, I think, because if you boot the machine up without ldap.conf, then log in.
I can put ldap.conf in place and immediately I can see all the user accounts etc. from the ldap server. If I then reboot, with ldap.conf in place, it hangs on boot again. I found a bug report for FC5 which stated this problem, but there was no solution. There was a workaround, making messagebus starting later in the boot process (move it from S22 to S27 in rc3/5.d), but that didn't help in my case.
My ldap.conf contains this (I've removed my actual ldap info): host my.server.ip.addr base dc=my,dc=dn uri ldap://ldap.mydomain.com ssl no tls_cacertdir /etc/openldap/cacerts pam_password md5 bind_policy soft
As I say, I think the ldap config is fine, because you can start it manually once the machine has booted up without an ldap.conf in place. I lifted it from a Centos client, which works fine and doesn't have the same problem with booting that Fedora does.
I don't know about you, but I have found the linux kernel to read pretty much any usb drive or sd card, while many bioses, especially, when they are older fail miserably. Now if you got yourself a machine which bios cannot boot from your 16 giga stick, wouldn't it be possible to use linux as kind of a bootstrap, install it on a 1 giga medium, that the bios can boot from and then when the linux kernel is running, give control to the other media that you really want to boot from. This should be doable.
It is basically going from a running kernel and its inird to give control over to another grub or syslinux. Does anybody know if this exists already? Truth is that many bioses are just garbage, old and fail at pretty much all new hardware, so why not use a linux kernel as a crutch, to get away from this old piece of junk? I did similar things already with a software raid, where i had a machine that couldn't boot from a HD that was larger than 150 giga.
I installed a 10 gb HD to put /boot on it and then give control over to some "fancy 21st century technology that can boot from this HUUUGE disks" (as from my dripping from sarcasm voice you can tell that pretty much all BIOSes are a thorn in my side and a P.I.T.A. for me, too often they only do 30% of what I expect them to)
If I install Citrix in Fedora (or Ubuntu) will I be able to remote in to my computers using Rdesktop or the Terminal Services clients included with Windows? Will it be faster than VNC?
When I asked about using remote dektop on Linux I was told that RDP was a proprietary MS thing, but I read it's based off Citrix and Ctrix is actually a better version of it that supports more features and different OSes and not just Windows.
I just install Fedora on my Pentium III machine (with the drive tray). So now I am running it at home and school and I need a way to remote into it...
I just installed Ubuntu 10.04 on a laptop that was given to me. It is having a lot of lag issues,especially when playing videos and visiting websites using flash. It's an Intel Pentium 4 2.4GHz machine. I think that it should perform better because I had used and AMD Sempron 2.0GHz machine with Ubuntu before and video playback was much better than this. I'm thinking that my problem is the graphics card driver. Here is the card that this machine has:
Code: :~$ lspci | grep Radeon 01:05.0 VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc Radeon IGP 330M/340M/350M The AMD machine was using a VIA graphics chipset.
I used the command "Xorg -configure" to create a xorg.conf file, hoping that might help. But it didn't. Here it is:
Is there any tweaking that I can do in the xorg.conf that might help? I don't know which of those options I should set. I also tried changing the driver to "ati" but that did nothing. found some info for settings with "man radeon", I'm going to try some of those out.
I'm attempting to upgrade the BIOS in an ASUS 1005HA netbook. The netbook runs SuSE 11.3, and no other OS. All the BIOS utilities on from ASUS are Windows or DOS based. ASUS has a utility titled afudos that apparently flashes the programmable ROM. Running afudos using the dosemu utility suggests that one needs to create a DOS boot drive, execute afudos during a reboot with the new ROM image located on the drive.
How does one accomplish said task on a netbook without a floppy disc drive? Do I create a bootable DOS USB flash drive that contains just afudos and the new bios flash rom upgrade? And if so, how does one do this? As a side issue, it looks like all the major motherboard vendors do not support Linux. That is, all the motherboard drivers require Windows or DOS.
I was just thinking about installing an operating system like ubuntu or ubuntu server on an external harddrive. this being possible , i would like to know if we can use the external drive to plug into any machine and run my ubuntu by just changing the needed bios mods in that system. and without further having to install the necessary hardware specific devices into my os.
Because each machine would have its own hardware set, how would the os handle it or would it have to install the necessary drivers and so on everytime it comes across a different system from the immediate previous hardware it was used with. and i know this was why laptops were invented even maybe to have that portability to use with but this without a laptop, just an external hard drive that can make up and help us use the hardware at hand with ease without any installations of any kind.
I'm running Ubuntu on my desktop. I have a dual-boot option between Ubuntu and Windows Vista. When I woke up this morning, my Ubuntu screen was frozen so I attempted to reboot...but I couldn't get past the boot screen. I can get into Windows just fine, but selecting Ubuntu just keeps cycling me through the initial boot screens over and overI am a still a beginner so please talk to me as though I were a child. Otherwise I'm sure I'll be confused.
My laptop sustained an injury and since the fall, it cannot progress past grub. The grub menu appears, but regardless of what option is chosen, the machine reboots (exception: memtest works fine).
I've just bought a new laptop (with no installed OS) and have (excitedly) burned a live cd for Karmic Koala 64bit: several people on the laptop manufacturer forums have got working with this particular laptop.
The live session works fine but when I install and then reboot I get 'GRUB Loading' with a flashing underscore and nothing else happens. I've found this thread and this bug report and have tried reinstalling GRUB to no avail.
I also have a live cd for 9.04 which I've tried to install and get a the same problem only now the message is 'GRUB Loading stage1.5' So I don't think it's a problem with the version of GRUB as described in the bug report thread.
I read something else that said it could be a problem with the mbr being in some way geared towards Windows but I'm not sure. I tried following those instructions but nothing happened and then I just got the same error again.
Any help would be greatly received since obviously I'm pretty desperate to get my spangly (and expensive) new machine to work. Edit: I also have a thread at the manufacturers' forums. But we're at a loss there too.
I just recently installed 11.04 fresh onto my computer. Everything's been working great and i've been enjoying the new interface immensely. However, today when i booted my pc up, after i entered my password and logged in, I'm stuck at the splash screen. I can move the mouse and i have the default 11.04 image up on the screen, but ive got no menus or taskbars and i know it hasn't logged in yet, because my wallpaper isnt up. I've restarted a number of times and this keeps happening.
I've got two laptops running Ubuntu. Both have had Lucid installed from the live cd. I have upgraded one of them to Maverick. Both distributions are running great after they boot up, but I haven't experienced any faster boot times with either distibution. Both boot to Bios and then the screen goes black with a blinking cursor in upper left corner of the screen. The black screen remains for 30 to 45 seconds and then I get the Ubuntu splash screen for maybe 5 seconds, and then desktop. Why am I not seeing faster boot times? I realize 45 to 60 seconds is good compared to other os's, but I anticipated much faster boot times. Shut down on the other hand is quite fast at maybe 5 to 10 seconds. Does anyone else get this black screen on boot? Seems like wasted time cause I can't tell what's going on during the time there is a black screen. This is not a real big deal breaker, as I don't reboot very often, but I just wonder why bootup isn't faster.
I'm trying to install Ubuntu on a Dell computer of mine but I can't get it to boot past the loading screen. I'm using 10.04 live CD. At the loading screen (boot, memory test, etc..) I select to boot the live CD and after that, I get a black screen followed by no signal from my monitor. My monitor is a 42" LCD TV (I had plans to turn this PC into a HTPC using Ubuntu and Boxee). I know Linux will work on this box, because it has in the past. Now, before I used to have an ATI Radeon X 1300 PCI-E card and now I am using an ATI Radeon 2900GT, and since cannot boot.
Does anyone have any idea on how I can get this to work?
I just recently put Ubuntu 10.10 for ppc on a Cd-R and installed it onto an old Mac I had found. The installation seemed perfectly fine I booted the computer and was presented to boot with two options "Linux" and "old" or to press enter and boot default. I had decided to boot default and it reaches the splash screen where the loading bar advances two dots and then completely stops.
I recently tried to clone a RHEL 4 system and migrate it to some different hardware (IBM Blade to an IBM x3650M2 rack mount). I'm getting an error when it tries to boot up. It gets past the grub part, but then errors out quickly with this error code...
I've done this before, but the other system I migrated didn't have a separate "/" and "/boot" partition. I think this may be why it's having an issue. It seems like "/boot" is actually /dev/sda1 and "/" is /dev/sda2 (from booting up RHEL rescue disk). I've tried changing fstab and grub.conf, but I think I may be missing something.
My Slackware's display suddenly got hanged with just a black screen and a mouse pointer visible not even the Ctrl+Alt+Backspace worked.So I switched off my system by pushing the button on the CPU .
After that when I tried to boot into my system it wont boot past going multiuser with below error messages
Code:
Hanging @ starting
Code:
Though I can login when trying to boot through singleuser but when I try to
Well today I decided that I couldn't wait for the offical release of 10.04 LTS, so I upgraded from 9.10 to 10.04 LTS Beta 2. After realizing that many problems had come with that update, I decided to just format my Ubuntu partition and reinstall it. Somehow my GRUB stopped working from when I formatted Ubuntu, so I whipped out the old Toshiba recovery disk for Windows Vista 32bit. After many attempts to have the recovery portion of the disk fix all of my problems and seeing no results, I decided that reinstalling Ubuntu (and GRUB) might make everything all better. Well it didn't. Grub shows my Windows partition but fails to boot it. After selecting it, it goes to a blank screen and stops responding. And to add to all of my problems, my BIOS has changed slightly. It no longer shows/or responds to F2 or F12 when I tried to give another try at that Toshiba recovery disk. That kinda sucks since I can't choose what to boot. Please help me!! I really don't want to have to format my entire hard drive and try to install Windows Vista again (Not that Vista is anything anyone should love) I have many expensive programs that can only be activated a certain amount of times. I don't even think that I could reinstall Vista since my BIOS won't let me boot the CD/DVD drive.
OpenSUSE is starting to drive me a bit nuts. Actually what I'm trying to do is simply install VMWare server on a recent as possible SUSE and run 2 virtual machines, both the same SUSE. Of course 11.2 32 bit doesn't run VMWare server 2 so it's back to 11.1. The trouble is, 11.1 won't install properly on my PC.
The install process, booted and installed from the 11.1 network install iso image on CD, runs fine. The PC reboots from hard disk and stops at the grub prompt. I've tried the auto-repair option and reinstalled it from scratch a second time always with the same results. It seems the root partition is hosed, and that's where my understanding hits its limits. Can anyone help?
Incidentally should anyone be able to advise on the VMWare conundrum I'd also be interested. Maybe in another thread...
I want to make my machine to PXE boot windows from another machine having RHEL5.2. I know the procedure to PXE boot linux, but I want to know is it possible to PXE boot your client machine with windows XP.
I recently reinstalled Ubuntu 11.04 "Natty Narwhal" Daily 20101124 on my netbook and decided to place /home on an external 500GB SimpleTech hard drive because the netbook's internal SSD is only 8 GB.
Well, when I boot into the main SSD to try and test out the system, I have two problems:
First of all, GRUB is unstable and won't always find the kernel to boot. In particular, I have to hit <Enter> one, two, even three times just for GRUB to find the kernel and boot the system.
However, that's not all:
When the system is booting, I wait endlessly for X to start. It doesn't. The Plymouth splash screen stays there and it looks like the system is endlessly booting with no progress.
Suggest chrooting into the drive and doing a "sudo apt-get dist-upgrade" by any chance? This being in order to make the system on the drive up-to-date? If so, I will see if it boots.
I have installed Ubuntu 10.10 Minimal on a 2GB USB using CLI and it is working very well after adding a few applications. But this USB will be used only on machines other than my own - likely with Windows as the only OS. And it is not comfortable for me to go into the BIOS of a strange machine to change the order of booting and afterwards go back to reset the order , especially with the owner looking on, obviously worried, and wandering whether his machine will still be working!
So my question: Is there any way to boot from a USB without having to go into the BIOS? code...
I understand this is not directly an ubuntu issue, but this arose as I was trying to install ubuntu, so I'm hoping some kind souls on here would be good enough to help anyway.
I've in the past installed ubuntu on to my PC using a CD, but this time I thought I'd try creating a USB startup disk.
I was required to set up the BIOS to change the boot order so I can boot from the USB flash drive.
The problems arose when I pushed the 'DEL' key (the correct key for my motherboard) to access the BIOS setup. When doing this the computer completely froze and would not progress any further to boot. It would still boot normally from the HDD provided I didn't try to enter the BIOS.
Looking on the internet for a solution I tried using the motherboard jumper to reset the CMOS. Now I can't boot up the computer at all. I get a message saying 'CMOS checksum error - Defaults loaded' then it asks me to press F1 to continue. I try this, but nothing happens. Clearing the CMOS has made things worse as now I can't get the computer to boot at all.
Have I killed my motherboard somehow? I've tried using a different keyboard (one USB and the other a USB keyboard but with an adaptor to connect it to the P/S2 port).
On further investigation any key press from the keyboard is enough to freeze the computer at whatever point.
My motherboard is an WinFast NF4SK8AA with AMD Athlon processor and 4Gb of mem.
i have ubuntu 10.04 server on a usb (it is an .img file) , and i.m trying to install it on an ancient machine (64mb of ram to be exact), and it has no usb option in the bios menu.
I have a 7 port USB hub, and have more than 2 usb storage devices, but in BIOS it only allows me to run off of e:/ f:/ and h:/ (h:/ is my built-in card reader) I want to be able to add new boot options, or at least 1 more for G:/, is this possible?
I have a recent ACER laptop that I used to use with Ubuntu only, but Ubuntu has crashed and won't boot anymore. I tried booting it via the live CD to try and recover my files before re-installing everything, but the CD won't run automatically.
My laptop is windows xp pro, I need to install ubuntu, so I kept Ubuntu CD into my lap and restart, again it shows windows xp, some body told "BIOS is not set to boot from CD or DVD drive".
