[GLLUG] Ubuntu on damaged hardware...

[Sean O'Malley]

This is just a wild guess, but i suspect the "bad sector error" is
referring to the actual cd-rom. Here is the starter list of
tests I would probably try. As always feel free to edit, disregard, or
disagree. :)

test the cdrom drive and media, boot into winders, and try copying the
entire Ubuntu cd to the harddrive (or if windows can't read it, try
another cd you burned that is full and windows can read.). If that doesn't
work... try doing it again with a factory cd-rom, if neither work...  i
would suspect the cd-rom drive.

-get one of the discs with the brushes on it, let it clean the lenses.

If the factory worked and ubuntu didnt...

-Try burning the cd at like 2x-4x. It takes forever, but the older cd-rom
drives have a hard time reading the media that was burned at a faster
speeds because the tracks arent burned in as deeply on the disc.

-Try using different media. Sometimes the lasers don't pick up the colors
very well. And sometimes they had problems reading the 700M media.

If both copies worked, which indicates a good cd-rom drive..

-run memtest x86 on it at least overnight. The guess here is that ubuntu
is using physical ram as swap space. However, there should be an
indication as to what -drive- it is referring to with bad sectors.
It might also be having issues with the high density ram.

If it passes memtest x86, try an older version of a linux Live CD.
It might not have enough ram to get a working swap and a working OS
especially if it is using shared memory for graphics. IIRC there was also
an issue with kernels larger then 1M in size on the older pentiums, but I
think that was an issue in software somewhere.

This probably shouldnt be last but along the same lines, it might actually
have flipped to text mode, then choked on the graphics chip and just quit
displaying.



On Wed, 12 Jul 2006, Thomas Hruska wrote:

> I was at a friend's place the other day and they were open to the idea
> of trying out Linux since Windows was out of the budget.  So I
> downloaded and burned Ubuntu and inserted the Live CD into the drive.
> The hardware was really old (was running WinME) but had been upgraded to
> 128MB RAM (IIRC, the CPU was a Pentium 250MHz).
>
> When I booted up with the Live CD, it started crawling very slowly.
> After about 5 minutes, it switched back to text mode and displayed a
> half-dozen "sector error" messages, which told me that the laptop had a
> bad hard drive.  However, it seems kind of odd that Ubuntu needed access
> to the hard drive at all.  I let it continue to attempt to boot up for
> another 10 minutes but it didn't seem to be doing very much.
>
> I booted the Live CD on a different computer just fine just to make sure
> the burn process hadn't been borked.  That computer had a considerably
> faster CPU but Ubuntu seemed to boot much slower than the Windows XP
> install on the same PC.  Is a Live CD just slower or can I use it as a
> relative measure of how fast the OS will actually load on real hardware?
>
> If I wanted to install Ubuntu on that computer (without changing the
> hard drive), how would I go about doing that.  I've hand-edited both
> FAT16 and FAT32 partitions before to mark bad sectors to drastically
> extend the life of a hard drive.  However, Linux uses EXT3 and that's a
> pretty extravagant format with the likelihood of seriously messing up
> (FAT16/FAT32 is far more forgiving).  Any tools out there designed to
> mark bad sectors/clusters under EXT3 filesystems?
>
> I'm also going to look at Xubuntu and see if that is a viable option in
> the future for when I encounter similar scenarios.  Anyone running
> Xubuntu and have a good feel for the minimum CPU speed that it will run
> _decently_ on?  Ubuntu clearly requires something like a 1.5GHz CPU to
> operate decently.
>
> --
> Thomas Hruska
> CubicleSoft President
> Ph: 517-803-4197
>
> Safe C++ Design Principles (First Edition)
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>
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>
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