Ubuntu Lucid, Oneiric, and Debian 6.0.3 prevent system POST once installed

[Michael Lueck]

My trusty main Linux machine, still loaded with Ubuntu 9.04 x86.

Intel DG33BUC motherboard, latest BIOS rev
Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Duo CPU E8500

So to upgrade, I purchased a new drive:

Hitachi Deskstar 7K1000.C 0F10383 1TB 7200 RPM 32MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal Hard Drive

BIOS saw the drive fine, Ubuntu 10.04.3 x64 boots / installed smoothly

Eject the CD, reboot, system WILL NOT POST! I see the nVidia BIOS screen, then blacks out, loan cursor at the top of the screen, FDD light stuck on. The cursor is at the top of the screen in that position PRIOR to the Intel splash screen coming on. Thus I know that POST has been halted.

Switch drives back to the 9.04 drive, system boots fine. Switch back, same symptoms.

Same thing with Ubuntu 10.04.3 x86.

Using another computer with Intel D945GNTL MB and Intel P4 631 CPU boots Lucid perfectly fine as installed on the DG33BUC system. So using that system, a "disk erase / wipe" utility to begin erasing the drive, and THEN the DG33BUC will POST again with the drive installed in it.

What does Ubuntu 10.04.3 both x86 and x64 do that is so nasty so as to prevent POST in an Intel DG33BUC based system?

[Michael Lueck (mlueck)]

Cross linking with UbuntuForums thread on the same topic...

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1856283

[Michael Lueck (mlueck)]

I am able to reproduce the same results when installing on the same system the latest Ubuntu 11.10 (Oneiric Ocelot) x64 from the Desktop / LiveCD. Updating bug description with the second release name.

Back to trusty Ubuntu 9.04 for the moment I guess. (shrug)

[Michael Lueck (mlueck)]

For another opinion I pulled down a copy of:

debian-6.0.3-amd64-netinst.iso

and installed a GUI desktop machine with that. Same thing, system will not POST with an installation having been done to the HDD.

[Michael Lueck (mlueck)]

I tried pulling down the alternate 10.04.3 ISO and installed from that, hoping to select Lilo rather than Grub2. No question was presented, Grub2 was installed, box will not IPL.

How is it possible to select Lilo rather than Grub2?

[Michael Lueck (mlueck)]

I was able to clean load 10.04.3 x64 from the LiveCD onto my machine, as usual no POST once loaded.

Then I took the drive to the P4/945 based system, installed Lilo, got that configured. I needed to update /etc/fstab back to using /dev devices and not referring to partitions by their UUID. Then it still wanted to put Lilo on the partition, not on the drive. So hand tweaked /etc/lilo.conf just a bit, and was successful with Lilo.

Next I purged off the two Grub packages.

Finally I took the drive back to my computer... and still will not POST with the 10.04 drive in it. So I guess Grub2 is really not to blame. What else could it be, though?

Any suggestions of what to try next?

[Michael Lueck (mlueck)]

An associate I work with was able to correctly identify the trouble with loads of Lucid, Oneiric, and the latest Debian. Turns out there is a HDD geometry incompatibility with these newer distros.

The work-around that masked the situation was to partition the blank drive with Ubuntu 9.04, then reboot to 10.04.3, specify the mount points for the existing partitions, and thus arrive at success.

In my mind, it is absolutely unacceptable for a modern Linux distro to mess up the HDD geometry / partitioning such that at system will no longer POST properly! I ended up RMA'ing a perfectly good / new HDD back to the manufacturer!! Not cool!!! >:-|

Reclassifying this report against fdisk and not grub2.

[Michael Lueck (mlueck)]

The HDD BIOS settings in my computer are as follows:

ATA/IDE Mode Native (can not change this)
Configure SATA As AHCI
S.M.A.R.T. Enabled
SATA 1 - 4 They just autodetect - can not even arrow to these, cursor position skips over them
Hard Disk Pre-Delay 0

In order to be able to change the ATA/IDE Mode, I needed to adjust the AHCI mode down to IDE, then I am able to adjust the ATA/IDE Mode setting and select between Native and Legacy.

None of the settings allow for manual adjustment of the drive geometry settings. All possible modes the BIOS support always force auto-detect of the geometry details.

[Michael Lueck (mlueck)]

I was able to load a blank hard drive successfully in this same system with XUbuntu 12.04.1 x64 edition. I did not have to partition the drive with Ubuntu 9.04 like I had to when loading 10.04 LTS.

I suppose it to be a bug in the specified editions of Linux around the time of release of 10.04 LTS. Fortunately it seems to have been corrected in the next LTS release of Ubuntu.

[Phillip Susi (psusi)]

gnu-fdisk is not normally used so this was assigned to the wrong place. This does point to a bug in your system bios, which should not care about geometry, which has been obsolete nonsense for almost 20 years now. I am curious though exactly what you mean and what the difference is between one that your bios is happy with and one that gets it upset. Could you provide the exact partition table that causes this failure?

[Michael Lueck (mlueck)]

@Phillip #9

Thank you for following up on this case.

What ever partitioner the Ubuntu LiveCD GUI installer uses to partition the disk made a partition table which was incompatible with the latest BIOS available from Intel for the motherboard in this system. Placing the hard disk drive into a system with older Intel motherboard (also with latest available BIOS for that motherboard) would POST and boot properly.

I have since migrated this troublesome system to Xubuntu 12.04, and that LiveCD installed BEAUTIFULLY on a brand new blank hard disk drive.

So unless a different partitioner is used between the Ubuntu and Xubuntu LiveCD's, then this problem is resolved by the code in 12.04.

In the case Ubuntu and Xubuntu use a different partitioner, then my success with Xubuntu 12.04 is irrelevant.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

[Expired for parted (Ubuntu) because there has been no activity for 60 days.]