Ubuntu Installation :: 9.10 Makes Unbootable USB Stick?
Apr 23, 2010
I have a 4 gig Kingston USB stick. I have an Eee PC with 4 gig internal flash drive (no hard drive). I can't find the specs but I believe it is roughly equivalent to an Eee PC 900 or something.
About a year ago I downloaded the then latest version of ubuntu for netbooks, created a bootable USB drive from my Mac, as per the instructions at:url
or whatever the equivalent site was then. It booted fine, it installed fine and everything was great.
Eventually the tiny flash drive in my EeePC got full. I couldn't upgrade to the new 9.10 distro through auto updates because there wasn't enough room to download them.
I tried to delete some old kernels and then delete some other stuff. I broke my linux installation and now it won't boot to a desktop. I can get a login prompt and I can boot to the fail safe terminal but not much else.
So, I tried repeating the steps above.
I downloaded the NEW version of ubuntu netbook remix from:url
I followed the instructions for making a bootable USB stick from the first link above. I used the EXACT SAME USB stick as last time (in fact, it still had the older version of the ubuntu install files on it).
There were no errors "creating" the USB drive and it can be mounted on my Mac and I can see the files are on it.
I stuck it into my EeePC and rebooted and hit the ESC key and selected the Kingston USB drive to boot from. The light on the USB drive flashed some, then the internal flash drive light flashed some and the EeePC booted from the internal drive.
I rebooted and went into the bios settings and made triple sure that it was set to boot from USB drive first and rebooted. The same thing happened (it "looked at" the USB drive, then booted from the internal drive).
I repeated the above a dozen times. I REinstalled the ubuntu files on the USB drive from my Mac. I repeated. Still the same.
I redownloaded the ubuntu files and did everything from scratch. Again no errors "creating" the USB drive and it can be mounted on my Mac and I can see the files are on it, but again, it is absolutely useless because it is unbootable.
I tried booting my Mac from the USB drive and my Mac didn't recognize it as a bootable drive either.
I found another 4 gig USB drive and repeated the steps above with it. It was exactly the same: no errors creating it, the drive is mountable on my Mac, but it is completely unbootable.
I am at a loss to find any info on this nor do I have any idea what to try next. I KNOW this worked with the first USB drive last year (with an earlier version of ubuntu). What could possibly have changed?
I've just reported a launchpad bug report about my desktop system being unbootable after upgrade to lucid lynx. [URL]... I opened this thread to ask if someone else experienced a similar problem and for collecting information and workarounds (none yet) about this quite serius problem. The system has an nvidia graphic card and proprietary drivers were installed before the upgrade. However I'm not sure the problem is related to this. FYI, the system booted regularly from a usb stick with ubuntu lucid lynx. SO the problem is in the upgrade path.
I tried running an upgrade from 8.04 LTS to 10.4 last night, and things seemed to be going smoothly. The upgrade progress was nearly complete, and I wandered off for a while to let it run. When I came back, I had nothing but an orange screen and and unresponsive system. I left it alone all night with the hopes that something would happen, but this morning nothing had changed so I hard restarted the system.
Ubuntu 10.4 appears in GRUB, but the system cannot boot and exits with a kernel panic and the message "vfs unable to mount root fs on unknown-block" I was able to boot to a 10.4 LiveCD, and I can browse all of my files from there. What can I do to get this system back up an running? I have dozens of user account and a lot of customization (it acts as a webserver with a wiki for a gaming website running on it, among other things), so I really really don't want to do a fresh install and lose all my data and customizations.
I updated 9.10 and system crashed during update and is now unbootable. It seems to freeze (or is just taking a really long time) at fsck. Is there any way to make my computer usable again without reinstalling the whole OS?
I did a routine update of my ubuntu 10.4 (in wubi vista) to the latest kernel (something -26) and installed a java plugin for firefox. After a reboot, i open up the "Ubuntu" entry and i see a message flash accross the screen (something about hda,0,0 or sda im not sure) then it just reboots the PC. No command line or anything. No need to say im pretty screwed
My question is, is there any way to get my files off of wubi? Or even better can i restore Ubuntu to working again? P.S for some reason the two times i have tried to run a live CD on this laptop, it has corrupted vista.
yesterday I performed an automatic security update suggested by the update manager on my virtualized (with VirtualBox on a Windows 7 host) Ubuntu 10.10 installation.
The update somehow failed and left me with an unbootable system. When I try to boot, I am told that various folders, files, and what not are missing. Then the system drops into a busybox and leaves me with an (initramfs) prompt.
This happens with all kernels I get offered by GRUB, although the error messages are quite different from kernel to kernel.
Well, the short of it is this: I don't have the slightest idea on how to get back to a working system and this site is the final straw I'm willing to grab. A complete disaster like this following an update initiated and executed by the system is unheard of in Windows-land; at least I haven't heard of it, yet, and therefore I am going to abandon Ubuntu and Linux altogeteher, if there is no remedy.
Suffice to say I had a dual boot at work with an essential windows 7 and non-essential linux install on it, and randomly upgrading the distro made windows7 unbootable. Cue a missed days work, much embarrassment and ear bashing from those who are convinced Linux is written entirely by communists and hippies. In the end I had to re-install windows, which cut off the ability to boot to ubuntu - although I've left the existing ubuntu partitions as they were.
Although I can get away with allocating a few partitions to ubuntu, I can't really justify fiddling with the MBR based upon this experience. I need a fast boot and persistent data for doing anything further with ubuntu at work, so I'm wondering whether a safer bet would be to setup a usb stick with enough grub to boot to the existing ubuntu install? Not a full usb distribution, just enough to boot into the existing install? how this would be doneIs it really just a grub-install /dev/sdXX (where XX is the usb)?
I have had Ubuntu desktop on my PC for a year now and am very happy with it. A couple of months ago I got a Ubuntu server 10.04 for playing about with. I have installed the gui, for personal reasons, but I want to upgrade to 10.10
Whenever I attempt the upgrade my server becomes unbootable and I have to reimage and start again. I have even tried performing the upgrade before I install the GUI but it still makes no difference.
Although I have the GUI I am doing the upgrade via command line.
Upon watching the upgrade in process, I find that no errors are occurring. Could it be something to do with my server provider?
I was running Windows 10 on MSI GT70 2OD-064US hoped to dual boot first had three primary partitions shrunk largest one and ran debian-8.3.0-amd64-netinst.iso chose guided install with remaining free space, didn't force UEFI asked if I wanted to install GRUB after finding Windows Vista (loader) I went ahead and installed. Couldn't boot afterwards with dark screen saying no install media, changed BIOS to legacy mode and got grub prompt followed tutorial and entered these commands:
grub> set root=(hd0,5) grub> linux /vmlinuz root=/dev/sda5 grub> initrd /initrd.img grub> boot
This caused it to boot without GUI I ran grub-update and restarted back at grub> again. How to get debian to boot or even windows 10 again?
I have an Acer Aspire 1410 laptop which was running Win7. The laptop lacks a DVD drive and came pre-installed with a recovery partition as well.I've been searching for ways to dual-boot Fedora on it. I bought a Samsung USB DVD drive, but I burned two copies of Fedora 12 and neither would boot, nor would my Knoppix Live CD. I even updated the bios. Then I tried liveusb-creator from my desktop Fedora 10 system, but I would still run into strange errors that prevented booting into the installer.
Finally I downloaded UNetbootin and created a USB stick to boot Fedora 12. Neither Fedora 12 nor Ubuntu would recognize my network adaptor for some reason. Undaunted, I then used UNetbootin to create a Fedora 11 image which got me into the boot installer for the first time. I then used my Fedora 12 image from my portable DVD drive to install. The install seemed to go well.
That is, until I rebooted. Grub came up as expected. Fedora 12 runs into a very early Kernel panic (not syncing: DMAR hardware is malfunctioning) within moments. I tried rebooting into Windows, but it apparently doesn't care much for Grub. It sends me into the Recovery software and asks me to reset my hard drive. I've tried that a couple of times now and it's useless. Is the problem with Grub? I thought it would play nicely with Win7 and at least allow me to boot into it, which is why I allowed it to overwrite my MBR. I lack a Win7 disc and cannot repair the MBR that way.
My current situation is I have two physical hard disks, one with Windows 7 (sda) and another where I recently installed Ubuntu 9.1 (sdb). At this time there were no issues.
Now after getting used to 9.1 I selected to upgrade to 10.04 from the update manager. During this install I was told I needed to upgrade GRUB which I understand is the bootloader and was told to choose where to install it.Now at this time I had no knowledge of drive naming conventions in Linux and there was no option to cancel the upgrade to look for help, so instead I followed the advice in the help box to simply select every device listed
The result was a fully working Ubuntu installation but at the cost of an unbootable Windows 7.Windows is showing on the GRUB menu but selecting it gives only a blank screen with a flashing cursor and no ability to do anything besides ctrl-alt-delete.
After a few hours of googling solutions including downgrading GRUB, there was no change and it seems that I actually have a version of GRUB on both drives. The one on the windows drive (sda) is the default loaded GRUB that shows Windows 7 but cannot boot it. The second GRUB install on the Ubuntu drive (sdb) is the one I am able to configure through Ubuntu but does not list Windows 7 on its boot list even after using "sudo update-grub"
I upgraded from 9.04 to 9.10.SSH, samba, LAMP server, etc etc etc are now failing to start when the os boots. I can start all of these services manually but is a bit of an annoyance.Maybe something simple but am not sure where to look to fix this.
When I start my system on the Ubuntu 10.10 CDROM I get a tiny icon at the bottom, then the screen shuts off due to no signal. So I cannot run the Live CDROM. Relevant here is that Debian CDROM runs just fine. (Lenny installs and runs good, but squeeze does not) Linux Mint (based on Ubuntu) gets me a pretty graphical welcome screen, then the monitor shuts off just like Ubuntu and Kubuntu.WinXP installed and runs without a hitch.
My system: Gigabyte GA-P43-ES3G with 4Gb ram, 750 Gb SATA HDD, Nvidia Quadro video card.I have gone through the BIOS settings looking for clues:SATA AHCI mode is set to IDE (versus AHCI)SATA port 0-3 native mode set to enabled (versus disabled which would be legacy IDE mode)Azalia codec set to auto (verus disabled)
I have noticed the (understandable) tendency of new Linux users to think about disk drives in the 'Windows way'; their first thought is to exchange a new drive for an existing one, rather than combine both drives for a larger 'file system'.
There are times when replacing one drive with another is indeed the correct action (aging drive, failing drive, slow drive, etc). But in other cases it may be preferable to use the inherent strength of the fstab (file system table) file to combine physical drives to become a larger 'file system'.
Lets first look at a user with an 8 gig netbook who is running out of space. Rather than replace the 8 gig flash drive with a 32 gig device, the old and new devices can be combined to yield a 40 gig 'file system':
This same principle can be applied to a user with a computer using an 80 gig hard drive, and who 'adds' a new 320 gig drive instead of replacing the 80 gig drive with the 320 gig drive:
This same principle can also be applied to building a massive 'file system' without the requirement of using RAID:
The above 12 terabyte system can be built using a basic motherboard with four open SATA ports and four 3tb hard drives. No server based equipment is needed; no raid hardware or software is required. This is just something that Linux does (and does very well).
For years I've had ctrl + alt + 1-4 (keypad) as shortcuts to desktop 1-4. It's worked flawlessly under everything from Slackware, through Debian and even the gnarled mess that Ubuntu is becoming.But now, ctl + alt + 1 dumps whatever window is active on my desktop to the bottom left corner of that desktop. Ctrl + alt + 3 dumps it to the bottom right corner;A7 goes top left and you can guess the rest.
i was writing a .img file to my usb stick with ImageWriter, but it didn't seem to do anything so i clicked the close gtk button and pulled the stick out of my pc. now my pc gives my an when i try to open the stick. is there any way to fix this. I can use win xp pro, win xp media center, win 7 starter, ubuntu 9.10 and ubuntu 10.04
I'm about to ditch Freenas as my NAS software and make it an Ubuntu server box. The mainboard is an Asus AT3ION-T dual core Atom board. Freenas runs happily from USB stick. I have no optical device to install Ubuntu from and would like to install Ubuntu Server to a USB stick.
im trying to get the files off of my unbootable laptop with ubuntu live cd. The problem i have is that i get into ubuntu then go to the computer option but i dont see the C: drive where my files are stored. How can i make it so i can see the hard drive in the laptop so i can copy my files to an external hard drive?
After realizing 10.04 Final doesn't support Intel 855 graphics card the hard way (upgrading to 10.04 from 9.10), I did some very silly things and now cannot even choose past kernals or go into failsafe graphics mode (which had worked prior to this).Long story short I screwed up GRUB. Because I am an amateur end user.I still have the 10.04 live cd. Can I reinstall this to put GRUB back to the original state?
My mom's computer is no longer bootable. I was thinking of attempting to fix it later on this week and am thinking of doing a chroot and updating via a live CD hoping that an even newer update solves the problem but I have some doubts of success. Does anyone have any information about this issue so that I can be better prepared to fix it? Also, I thought I should mention that I tried the second newest kernel to see if that would make it work. It didn't. The error is something along the lines of having the /dev/diskuuid change. If I'm correct, Ubuntu changed the disk's name and is trying to boot the old name. It's dropping to an initramfs shell (not the regular terminal where you can work miracles ).
I tried to install SliTaz to my flash drive to save a DVD. When I booted into it, it gave me a unetbootin custom boot screen with a 10 second count down to boot to default- the only option. I hit enter, it resets to 10 seconds, I wait 10 seconds and it still resets to 10 seconds.
Yesterday I got an update in update-manager: gdm blabla 3.2... installed. restarted. And I see nothing after the boot screen (plymouth, default one) display stays blank, even caps-lock doesn't turn on its indicator on the keyboard. hdd activity indicator on the laptop doesn't blink, only power indicator is on... the only way is to press and hold power button to turn it off. restart and I see the same picture........
I thought that's hdd, because yesterday ubuntu froze completely on a ..... video (adobe I hate you!)
so I turned laptop off and started again (before it froze I installed that gdm "security-"update) and saw the blank screen for the first time.
then I booted into "single" mode, manually starting X OR GDM gives me the same blank screen with frozen/unusable keyboard, caps-, numlock do not word, I can't switch virtual terminals...
so I've reinstalled the whole system an hour ago. Everything went well!!!!I booted into clean 11.04 (except my configs, cuz I haven't formated /home partition). Then I restored my ppa's (/etc/apt) that I backed up from the 'single' mode... updated apt database, restored all of my backuped apps (dpkg --get-selections >... dpgk --set-selections <...)an hour to update everything. installed ati driver, RESTART, and what I see? BLANK SCREEN RIGHT AFTER PLYMOUTH.
startx from single mode = blank screen gdm start from single mode = blank screen
I can't use ubuntu, PLEASE HELP ME fixing that crap.
I downloaded yesterday gdm blabla3, blabla3.1 and blabla3.2
downgraded the crapped gdm-0ubuntu3.2 to 3 and to 3.1 NO DIFFERENCE. I JUST GET BLANK SCREEN.
before restoring the apps everything worked.
and yesterday THE ONLY INSTALLED UPDATE WAS gdm
there are absolutely NO ERRORS in /var/log/*I viewed every file from that dir, that was created at boot attempt...no errors, nothing, just blank screen
I have a Macbook Pro 5,5. I had Fedora 14 installed on it, updated to the latest version. I updated the kernel, and performed an update. Now, every time my system starts, it loads up the startup fedora bar, and it gets stuck at the bar being loaded 100%.I press ESC to see what is going on behind the scenes, and I notice that the problem is that atd cannot start up.
I compiled my own custom kernel for the first time. I tinkered with different options, nothing to difficult. I actually didn't expect it to work the first time.
I had kept the original lilo boot config just in case something was to go wrong. Now when I try to boot the system, I always get a "VFS: cannot mount root system on (8,3)". I googled this and found that my kernel did not support my root filesystem (btrfs). So I made an initrd with btrfs kernel module, but it didn't help. I then got a string of errors about how /dev could not be mounted.
My question is two-fold. First, how come when I configure the system back to when it was first installed, it still won't boot? Im using the same kernel (2.6.37.6-smp). Second, how can I get myself out of this rut without reinstalling?
lilo.conf
Code: lba32 append=" vt.default_utf8=0" boot=/dev/sda vga = normal # Linux - Slackware image = /boot/vmlinuz-huge-smp-2.6.37.6-smp root = /dev/sda3 label = Linux read-only
BTW, I have been maintenancing the system by chrooting into the device off of my slackware boot disk. Im on slack 13.37
I have installed Ubuntu Lucid Lynx Alpha on my computer.was running fine until I installed usplash. Now when I boot up I get a message saying "Ubuntu is running in low-graphics mode" and a list of options. When I select any of them and press Enter I get a blank screen. I can't even load a command line. I want to remove usplash to see if that fixes the problem, but I would have to do it from another OS. How could I do that? My other operating systems are Ubuntu Karmic and OpenSUSE.
I copied the unr 9.10 iso to my usb stick fine using the program from pendrivelinux for ubuntu 9.1. I think it worked well, because it now has a ubuntu logo on the usb and says "install ubuntu netbook remix." When I get to the BIOS menu and to the boot options, I get a box which says three things: SDD slot, D: drive, and disabled (maybe talking about the D)When I press enter on the D: drive nothing happens. When I say to save configuration and exit it goes right to xp again. I have no idea what to do... I'm on an EEEpc 1005-HA running xp.
I wish to install a fully working Ubuntu system on my 16GB USB disk so that when I boot from my USB stick I get directly into Ubuntu. I do not want to be prompted with the option of "Try Ubuntu" or "Install Ubuntu". How do I do this?
I'm using an old netbook with Ubuntu Remix 9.04 and I thought it's about time I installed the newest version.Therefore I put the latest Ubuntu Netbook version on my 4GB USB stick with USB Startup Disk Creator.Furthermore I would like to have the Desktop version on the same USB stick. I tried but the second version (Desktop) seems to overwrite the first (Netbook). Is it possible at all to have 2 bootable versions side by side on one USB stick?
