Problem booting to partition formatted by gparted 4.3 & 4.31

Please post any bugs you have found
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rubberdragon
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Problem booting to partition formatted by gparted 4.3 & 4.31

#1 Post by rubberdragon »

I noted this problem with 4.3 but put it down to lib corruption - I was using 4.3 with old kernel for some reason and had added 3.01 devx and observed that - (quote)

Something wrong with gparted on my system. Can't seem to boot any linux partition created with 4.3. Something installed, possibly devx (Ver 3.01, of course), overwrites the target of /usr/lib/lidstc++.so.6 as ..6,0.8 instead of ..6.0.9. When this is corrected, new partitions won't grub up.

- that was in Misc thread 'Flawless full hdd upgrade', perhaps the wrong place to report this. I omitted to say that gparted would not launch fully until the libstc++ file had been corrected. Then, gparted would launch. When, having reinstalled a filesystem to a reformatted partition, rebooting would fail with the error message above.

I'm now testing 4.31 (default kernel) with devx_431.sfs installed. No problem launching gparted this time, However, using the same method
to reinstall still causes the same boot failure.

My accustomed procedure for backing up and restoring filesystems for a full installation is to mount the target partition from another installation, create a tar.gz of the filesystem and save to other media.

To restore, format the partition to vfat, then ext3, mount it and then untar the tar.gz file. Simple system, has allways worked until now.

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rjbrewer
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#2 Post by rjbrewer »

I think we may be talking about the same problem:

http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewto ... 549#352549

Inspiron 700m, Pent.M 1.6Ghz, 1Gb ram.
Msi Wind U100, N270 1.6>2.0Ghz, 1.5Gb ram.
Eeepc 8g 701, 900Mhz, 1Gb ram.
Full installs

rubberdragon
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Not sure it's just gparted problem

#3 Post by rubberdragon »

Thanks for reply. Have to say your post looks lost amongst all the others but is doubtless in the right place. This is the first time I've posted a bug candidate, so apologies for making things untidy.

I recall trying fdisk instead under 4.31 (old kernel), but with same grub error.

Looks like I'm talking about 2 issues here, devx with old kernel, and a grub boot problem.

I recognised a number of other issues that have been less troublesome for me, notably using alsamixer to raise the master volume from a default
zero to something tolerable immediately after running alsa wizard.

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rjbrewer
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Re: Not sure it's just gparted problem

#4 Post by rjbrewer »

rubberdragon wrote:
I recall trying fdisk instead under 4.31 (old kernel), but with same grub error.

Looks like I'm talking about 2 issues here, devx with old kernel, and a grub boot problem.
It's not a "grub boot problem" as far as I can tell.
I have grub installed in its' own partition on my pc and add new installs
to the menulst manually.

My problem is making a bootable partition with the new 4.3 series
(any kernel).

I'll give it a try with fdisk and cfdisk and see what happens.

Inspiron 700m, Pent.M 1.6Ghz, 1Gb ram.
Msi Wind U100, N270 1.6>2.0Ghz, 1.5Gb ram.
Eeepc 8g 701, 900Mhz, 1Gb ram.
Full installs

rubberdragon
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Terminology

#5 Post by rubberdragon »

I agree grub is not likely to be the problem. Grub is merely issuing the error message when it can't address the partition cited.

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rjbrewer
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#6 Post by rjbrewer »

Gparted in 4.3.1 creates partitions with a 256 inode size, instead
of the usual 128 that puppy needs.

Here's a quick fix:

http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewto ... 493#354493

Inspiron 700m, Pent.M 1.6Ghz, 1Gb ram.
Msi Wind U100, N270 1.6>2.0Ghz, 1.5Gb ram.
Eeepc 8g 701, 900Mhz, 1Gb ram.
Full installs

cichlasoma
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Re: Not sure it's just gparted problem

#7 Post by cichlasoma »

rjbrewer wrote: It's not a "grub boot problem" as far as I can tell.
I have grub installed in its' own partition on my pc and add new installs
to the menulst manually.
(...)
Gparted in 4.3.1 creates partitions with a 256 inode size, instead
of the usual 128 that puppy needs.
I believe, it IS sort of Grub boot problem. Older versions of GRUB need 128 inodes, not Puppy itself. You cannot boot a partition created by GParted from Puppy 4.3 with Grub installed by Puppy 4.21. When you both install Grub and format partitions with GParted from one of them, you have no problems. (EDIT: You also can use GRUB from 4.3 to boot partitions formated in 4.21, of course.)
See https://bugs.launchpad.net/grub/+bug/207001 and http://forums.fedoraforum.org/showthread.php?t=191363
Last edited by cichlasoma on Mon 26 Oct 2009, 10:54, edited 1 time in total.

Philh
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#8 Post by Philh »

If you are already using an older grub you can use that to boot Puppy on a partition with a 256 inode size
by copying the vmlinuz file from Puppy to the partition where grub is

title Puppy Linux 431 full on hd0,8 using vmlinuz on hd0,0 to boot inode256
root (hd0,0)
kernel /boot/p431full/vmlinuz root=/dev/sda9 pmedia=atahd nosmp

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rjbrewer
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#9 Post by rjbrewer »

cichlasoma:
Philh:

Excellent gentlemen!

Here's what I found.

Put my slave drive in master position and did a full install of
431 with Grub on the mbr. Booted fine, including the the 431
install that was already on that drive that I had converted to
128 inodes.

Moved the drive back to slave and deleted Grub from slave
and the original sda1 partition on master. Reran Grub from
431 cd to mbr and sda1.

Everything boots, including the original 411 install on sda3;
128 and 256 inodes.

Inspiron 700m, Pent.M 1.6Ghz, 1Gb ram.
Msi Wind U100, N270 1.6>2.0Ghz, 1.5Gb ram.
Eeepc 8g 701, 900Mhz, 1Gb ram.
Full installs

rubberdragon
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Joined: Wed 25 Jul 2007, 21:40
Location: On permanent leave

#10 Post by rubberdragon »

I had wondered about not using the GRUBCONFIG script at the end of hd install with the new distro. For a long time now I have routinely clicked the expert tab followed by the quit tab in order to avoid overwriting menu.lst. Lazy, I know! I've now reinstalled a 4.31 full installation with a new MBR grub and will reconstruct the various add-ons I use with a view to isolating the software that overwrote /usr/lib/libstdc++.so.6.09. I'll report back.

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rjbrewer
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#11 Post by rjbrewer »

rubberdragon wrote:I had wondered about not using the GRUBCONFIG script at the end of hd install with the new distro. For a long time now I have routinely clicked the expert tab followed by the quit tab in order to avoid overwriting menu.lst. Lazy, I know! I've now reinstalled a 4.31 full installation with a new MBR grub and will reconstruct the various add-ons I use with a view to isolating the software that overwrote /usr/lib/libstdc++.so.6.09. I'll report back.
I've had grub installed on its' own little (10mb) partition for more
than a year. Quite convenient when testing new puppies and
never needed to mess with mbr untill now.
Fortunately the 431 grub is backward compatible.
Wonder if the switch to the newest grub (ver. 2) will need
another mbr reinstall.

Inspiron 700m, Pent.M 1.6Ghz, 1Gb ram.
Msi Wind U100, N270 1.6>2.0Ghz, 1.5Gb ram.
Eeepc 8g 701, 900Mhz, 1Gb ram.
Full installs

rubberdragon
Posts: 57
Joined: Wed 25 Jul 2007, 21:40
Location: On permanent leave

More Bother

#12 Post by rubberdragon »

To clarify, I have my grub files on sda1, a small ext2 partition containing a stripped down Puppy 2.02 full installation, and grub in the MBR. My 2 other primary partitions are 2: vfat Win95 dos & 3: swap. I have 3 ext3 logical partitions with 5: Puppy 4.3, 6: image based systems, & 7: this new 4.31, - not that I think any of this is relevant.

Since installing grub from 4.31, I'm getting Read Error message on cold boot. Reset boots as normal. The boot output freezes at

Grub loading Stage1.5Read Error

Just like that. As I say, that's from cold boot only. All my installed systems boot correctly otherwise.

rubberdragon
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Progress

#13 Post by rubberdragon »

Thanks for the suggestion to re-install. I've tried running setup from the grub shell - ie root (hd0,0) followed by setup (hd0), shut down for an hour, but on rebooting cold it's still there - could be some corruption of the grub files in (hd0,0). I'll try a full reinstall via GRUBCONFIG later.

Good news is I've now installed all the same software in 431 as reported in 430 above, including devx_431.sfs. This time, there's no overwriting of /usr/lib/libstdc++.so.6.09 with .....6.08, so I'm confident that that aberration was caused by using the old kernel 4.30 with the 3.01 devx.

I've tested gparted by reformatting sda2 (vfat dos) to ext2, and then back to vfat. I've rebooted successfully (warm) since.

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