Subj : Re: Slimmed down Debian To : Barry Martin From : Ky Moffet Date : Wed Aug 28 2019 15:50:00 BARRY MARTIN wrote: > Hi Ky! > > > And as a FWIW: might want to get "Boot Repair Disk": > > https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Boot-Repair > KM> Used something similar when Mint's GRUB committed seppuku (how? I > KM> *LOOKED* in the video config util. Didn't touch anything, just > KM> looked. Reproducible. > > I had a somewhat similar issue with Windows ages ago: use a specific > option on a communication utility I used with BBS mailrun and it (the > utility) would then fail and needed to be reloaded. Eventually found a > specific file as being corrupted; found could just copy in that one file. > Eventually renamed that one file to act as a placeholder, copied in, and > no more problems. Apparently didn't like where it was on the hard > drive. Yeah, had something like that going on with the 286 and WordPerfect. Apparently when the config file loaded from disk, it got corrupted, but the copy in memory was okay. So the solution was to do a copy-from-here-to-there of the config file as part of the WP startup batch file, so it would have the good copy (stashed outside the WP directory) in memory even tho the on-disk file got corrupted. Might have been a side effect of that system having some bad RAM that was locked out by guessing the address until it stopped crashing. > KM> This is why I dumped Mint, tho I gather the > KM> bug has since been fixed.) Took about two seconds. But it was > KM> just rewriting GRUB. If it has to do a sector hunt for where the > KM> partition should start/end, it would take longer. I don't know if > KM> it's significant that Mint is based on Ubuntu, but... seems to me > KM> the bootloader should be absolutely bulletproof and bombproof. > > If I were to troubleshoot Mint being based on Ubuntu would be a starting > point. As for bullet- an bombproof, should be, but nothing is. You'd think. But Mint is basically Ubuntu Lite -- only loads about 25% as much Stuff. (And runs WAY faster on the same hardware. Mint will run perfectly fine on a PC where Ubuntu won't even load.) So the problem might actually have been something that was omitted. Except I vaguely recall hearing that Ubuntu 17 had the same problem, except with a different trigger. Which still doesn't eliminate "something omitted". Of course if you want Ubuntu Really Lite and Really Fast, there's Puppy, which is based on U. but is only about 10% as big. That, BTW, was one of my ongoing gripes with older linux: why on earth does the average user need to load every daemon every written? Apache webserver, running for no reason on a desktop machine, WTF?? No wonder performance was so awful. Most of 'em seem to have stopped loading that sort of stuff, having finally noticed that server and desktop are not contiguous functions. > KM> GPT is needed for HDs that exceed 2.2TB. > > So that wasn't the issue as only a 250 GB SSD. The problem got > corrected, I didn't bother to try to figure out what the correction was. Of course now there's the confusion between UEFI and Legacy BIOS, and assorted related things I haven't been arsed to pay attention to so long as everything works. > KM> I have a bunch of > KM> systems all about the same age, 2009ish, and only the Dell > KM> supports GPT, as we discovered when the rest all rejected a 3TB > KM> HD. (Hmm. I could put it in the PowerEdge.) > > I'm not keeping track of the dates; enough for me to remember what > hardware is inside! (And usually that's only when working on it!) Any > system requiring a large storage device also needs to be fast so > automatically new/newer. Large storage and faster don't necessarily follow. Main thing isn't speed, but whether the BIOS supports that large HD. You can hook a very large drive to an exceedingly old system, if it has proper support. Or if the drive has translation support, like old Disk Manager or WD's external drive cases, which have their own. (Which is how I have a 4TB and a 6TB hanging off Bullet's USB3 card, tho Bullet doesn't support over 2TB.) Incidentally if those large external HD cases fail you can't just hook the HD to a PC and off you go. They use their own translation scheme so old systems can read/write a disk beyond their native capacity, so to read the drive it has to be in an external case with the correct firmware. Fortunately there are lots of 'em on ebay, shucked by cloud companies who discovered these were a cheaper way to buy bulk large HDs. > KM> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GUID_Partition_Table > KM> Well, I guess I'm covered on the PowerEdge (with > KM> its gaggle of 3TB HDs), cuz it'll need a 64bit OS to make good > KM> use of it, and they all handle it. > > Is the PowerEdge the system you were given a few months ago? Seems like > it had a few multi-TB drives and several smaller ones. At the time > wouldn't boot as was a remote boot. Yep, "What to do with a giant server" over in Windows. It has 8 3TB HDs. It had 4 480GB SSDs, which got filched to upgrade other stuff. Did I mention how I accidentally made a USB bootable Win7?? :) Supported OSs, handy in a Dell notice today: PowerEdge R510 Operating System: Novell SuSE Linux ES 11, Windows Server 2008 x64, Windows Server 2012, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6, Windows Server 2012 R2, Windows Server 2008 x86, Windows Server 2003 x64, Suse Linux ES 10 It can also run ESXi (Bare Metal Hypervisor, VMware). There exists a free version which I've fetched but haven't looked at yet. I haven't seen a linux server edition since Novell switched to SuSE some 15 years ago (that was also their last seminar), so pretty clueless there! Its big selling point was really good remote management. þ RNET 2.10U: ILink: Techware BBS þ Hollywood, Ca þ www.techware2k.com --- QScan/PCB v1.20a / 01-0462 * Origin: ILink: CFBBS | cfbbs.no-ip.com | 856-933-7096 (454:1/1) .