fluxbuntu 7.10 rc boot failure on some machines

[Hmpf]

Booting the new 7.10 rc cd. works on one computer, but not on the other one. Other boot cds work fine. Boot fails directly after cdrom spins up: boot from atapi-cd rom: boot failure.

Swapping the cdrom-drives between machines changes nothing.

Specs of the machine not able to boot the cd:
P II Klamath on ATC-6130 Mainboard
If you need more info let me know.

Another user on ubuntuusers.de reported the same problem with a laptop.
He found a workaround using a bootable floopy disk and choosing cdrom from the menu of the floopy disk. Will try that when I find a still usable floopy disk ;)

[Hmpf (dns-hmpf)]

Using a sbootmgr.dsk bootdisk and then booting the cd from the floppy menu worked.

[Gossar (gossar)]

Also unable to boot from Fluxbutnu 7.10 RC for i386. CD drive spins up but proceeds directly to the old boot partition on hda—no splash, no install menu.
Ubuntu Gutsy Live CD will boot (but not run due to mem constaints).
Fluxbuntu nBuild1-rev2 also boots with no problem.

Checked iso checksum; burned to different brand media both CD-ROM & CD-RW; mounted CDs and verified full disc against md5sum.txt.
Top level contents of CD comprise:
.disk install pool
README.diskdefines isolinux preseed
dists md5sum.txt ubuntu

AMD K6-2, 256MiB RAM;
Biostar M5ATA
hda 5GiB; hdb 3GiB;
hdc Memorex 52MAXX 2452AJ;
hdd TDK CDRW161040X
current kernel 2.6.17-10-386

[secdroid (fdzimmerman)]

Mine also booted fine on one computer, not on another. Employed careful slow burns with md5 sums checked throughout. Known good media and drives.

Booting computer verified integrity of CD with CD test, while failing computer never got to boot splash screen.

I used a Smart Boot Manager 3.7.1 floppy on the failing computer and it booted the CD.

The floppy load time allowed me to see a message that had previously been scrolled off the screen by the hard disk grub load of a distro's splash screen --
[QUOTE]Boot from ATAPI CD-Rom: Bootable CD not exist...[/QUOTE]
from Award BIOS v4.60

[rexykik (rexykik)]

I have this same issue with a brand new cd rom drive; tried about three.

Motherboard ECS KT600-A
Ram: 1024mb

I forget which bios.

[nolla (v-nykanen)]

My box is AMD Duron 800, with award bios (dont know the version). The problem is exatly the same... I wonder where i could find a floppy these days :)

[Grahack (christophegragnic)]

I had the same.
Managed to boot on the iso though, without a floppy.
See https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Installation/FromWindows#head-78c19b6681c16d2dc3f82baeddf3a8465d39a0bd
and thanks to rxKaffee for pointing me to the docs.

[MerlinSVK (merlinsvk)]

Hi there. I have this same issue. I can boot the CD on Sempron 2800+, but i can not on PIII 633 Mhz Celeron. But I have solved this problem - I changed the boot record in .iso file (i386) and used the boot record from Linux Mint 2.0 (but i think that the other boot records will be OK). Than I burned the "changed" ISO, and now I can boot on any i386 machine.

[Mike Perrin (mperrin)]

I have the same problem on two out of three machines. Fluxbuntu 7.10 RC CD would not boot on a Biostar M7VKQ with 800 MHz Duron nor a Jetway V4MDMP with Athlon XP 2000+. It did boot on an ASUS A7V133C with Athlon 1000/266, where the CD integrity check was performed with positive results. The Jetway and ASUS machines have the same model Lite-ON DVD-RW drives so the drive is not a factor. I have had no issue booting Ubuntu or DamnSmallLinux CDs on any of these machines.

[Carna (vongola15)]

the same here with i386.

My specs are

Pentium celeron 400Mhz , 64MB ram, but I can't understand the motherboard name... anyway the nbuild did work and boot on this machine.
Cd integrity is fine.
Other ubuntu cds boot fine on this machine

[Mike Perrin (mperrin)]

I was able to correct my no-boot problems by remastering the CD image.
This indicates that there is no defect in the fluxbuntu build, only some
strange problem that occurred when the iso image was created.

The process I used is:
1. Mount the original downloaded iso image file to a temporary directory.
2. Make a tar archive of the mounted file tree.
3. Unmount the iso image and remove the mount directory.
4. Recreate the file tree by extracting the tar archive.
5. Make the recreated file tree writable so genisoimage can modify boot files.
6. Create a new bootable image from the recreated file tree.

The commands I used are detailed below. I was working in Fedora 7 so
I used genisoimage which is a newer version of mkisofs. The options
and arguments in my command line should work with mkisofs also.

cd to the directory where you have saved the downloaded fluxbuntu iso image.
As root:
mkdir fluxbuntu-7.10RC
mount -t iso9660 -o loop fluxbuntu-7.10-installer-i386.iso fluxbuntu-7.10RC
tar -cvf fluxbuntu-7.10RC.tar fluxbuntu-7.10RC
umount fluxbuntu-7.10RC
rmdir fluxbuntu-7.10RC
tar -xvf fluxbuntu-7.10RC.tar
chmod -R +w fluxbuntu-7.10RC
genisoimage -J -r -o fluxbuntu-7.10RC-remaster.iso \
-b isolinux/isolinux.bin -c isolinux/boot.cat \
-no-emul-boot -boot-load-size 4 -boot-info-table fluxbuntu-7.10RC

You can now burn the remastered iso image to CD using your normal method.

[Grahack (christophegragnic)]

Thanks Mike, this works well until I try to install with the remastered cd. There's a "error reading Release file" problem. Is it a checksum thing ?

For ref, I found this thread on the forum: http://community.fluxbuntu.org/index.php?topic=397.0

[Mike Perrin (mperrin)]

Grahack,

I did not have a problem installing from the remastered CD, so I don't think it has anything to do with checksums. It could be that you just got an error in your burn. Did you run the media integrity check on the boot menu? If you did and it passed, you may want to try opening the Release file to verify that it is not corrupt. Mount the CD on a working machine and look in the dists/gutsy directory. stable and unstable are links to gutsy, so there is only one Release file. You can open it with an editor or just cat it from the command line. Hope this helps.

Mike

[Grahack (christophegragnic)]

Ok, thanks, that was me: I didn't see the tar error messages that I must had doing the trick on a vfat. CD validates now.

[Medieval_Creations (mcreations77)]

I also experienced this problem with the 32 bit version of Fluxbuntu on my AMD64 machine.
A simple boot manager fixed the problem. Oddly enough the 64bit version loaded fine.

[Francesco Baldini (francesco-baldini)]

I dowloaded the iso of the release candidate and burned it. Tried to boot on different machines and different cd drives with no success. Every time the cd doesn't boot and the machine boot normally from the hd. Verified the bios settings to check the boot device priority, but everithing was ok. I think there's a problem with the image. The result is a non-installable system, so a necessary choice for other operative system.

[Mike Perrin (mperrin)]

Francesco,

Did you try to remaster the CD image using the procedure in my 2007-11-04 posting? It worked for me and Grahack, and presumably others.

Mike Perrin

[Francesco Baldini (francesco-baldini)]

Mike, you're right. I remastered the CD image as you explained and it worked well. Thanks.

Francesco

[Joe Jaxx (joejaxx)]

This has been confirmed.

[Norswap (nhelaurent)]

For non-ubuntu distributions, you can use the above, just change genisoimage by mkisofs.

[lootsy (lootsy)]

Also confirmation of the bug and the workaround:

Remastering the CD under my Xubuntu system as described above yield to a bootable CD on my old PC.

[Orby (orbman)]

I have remastered an ISO and have put it on a server in New York.

It is totally *unofficial* and is in no way supported by me or anyone else, use it at your own risk, it has been confirmed as working, but it may not work for all.

http://66.150.224.105/unofficial/fluxbuntu-7.10RC-remaster.iso
http://66.150.224.105/unofficial/fluxbuntu-7.10RC-remaster.iso.MD5SUM

md5sum = 58ddfe1ef74543eb7aaf6a2e8cf726b3 fluxbuntu-7.10RC-remaster.iso

Hope this helps some people out.

[doorknob60 (doorknob60)]

This is confirmed on one of my older computers, it seems like it has a lot more problems with older computers (the ones that need Fluxbuntu) than with new computers (the ones that do fine with regular Ubuntu). Se yeah, this is a pretty serious bug.

[reddyreal (soundskan)]

This bug is confirmed. I am using a Thinkpad 600x PIII 500 MHz. The remastered ISO did not work for me, either. Fwiw, Ubuntu Gutsy's Live CD does work for me.
Would really like to use Fluxbuntu on this computer as I want a nice-looking, small and functional Linux distro that will run on this old computer.

[reddyreal (soundskan)]

Alright, I'm dumb. I was burning the ISO improperly on Roxio Toast. Once I burned it as an image, the original 7.10 RC ISO worked perfect. Gracias.

[Orby (orbman)]

*NOTE*

the remaster ISO will not match the above MD5SUM anymore, it was removed during a server rebuild and the remaster was redone.

the current ISO MD5SUM is:
3b2d28301063a30e94e302ed46481cf3 fluxbuntu-7.10RC-remaster.iso

the url for the ISO still remains the same.
http://66.150.224.105/unofficial/fluxbuntu-7.10RC-remaster.iso

this is a completely unsupported remaster use at your own risk!