Re: Boot displays just one dot and hangs - LBA48 during grub2-install and old BIOS during booting

[sashab]

Hello Juhani,

first of all: About reinstalling GRUB:
  - Do you reinstall from chroot? You should.
  - Have you also bind-mounted /dev and /run? You should.
    (Of course also mount /proc and /sys with matching fs-types.)

About debugging:
Are you sure it's a blockdev-Problem?
Do you have a timeout set in your grub.cfg?
Set one and see what happens.

One thing you may try is to install GRUB to a flash drive,
get there and use the configfile [1] command to load the config from 
your shiny SSD.

With kind regards,
    sashab

[1] https://www.gnu.org/software/grub/manual/grub/grub.html#configfile


On 11/28/18 3:51 PM, Juhani Jaakola wrote:
> The IDE hard disk of my old IBM R50p laptop failed, so I replaced it
> with a new IDE SSD (model PA25-32). I booted with a Fedora 28 LXDE
> live USB stick and installed Fedora 28 to my new SSD. When I try to
> boot, the system displays just one dot (a period) in the top left
> corner and hangs. I have to use the power button to reboot from that
> situation.
>
> When I boot again with Fedora 28 LXDE live USB stick, I can see that
> the files in the new SSD are intact. I tried to re-install GRUB
> several times, but I get always the same results, except if I use
> option "--disk-module=native" then boot hangs but it displays two
> dots!
>
> In the live USB stick I can see that the SSD is in LBA48 mode:
>
> [   10.059225] ata1.00: ATA-9: PA25-32, 20150807, max UDMA/133
> [   10.059228] ata1.00: 62377984 sectors, multi 0: LBA48
>
> The BIOS of my R50p is 1RETDIWW (3.14 ) and EC is 1RHT71WW-3.04. The
> BIOS is dated 20 Jan 2005. As far as I know, the EC (Embedded
> Controller) firmware is the latest possible and the latest BIOS was
> published 18 Jun 2007. The BIOS change logs do not show any changes to
> booting or handling disks.
>
> I have written details of my struggle to FedoraForum.org posting:
> https://forums.fedoraforum.org/showthread.php?319160-Boot-displays-just-one-dot-and-hangs
>
> It seems that booting proceeds the longest time when I use
> "--disk-module=ata" but it still hangs!
>
> My theory is that when I install GRUB (with the live USB stick), the
> disk is in LBA48 mode. But when the system is booting and loading
> parts of GRUB, the BIOS is not using LBA48 mode. So the disk geometry
> is seen in different ways during installation time and booting, which
> causes GRUB to read garbage and the system hangs when executing that
> carbage???
>
> Any ideas? How can I debug this?
>
> Regards, Juhani Jaakola
>
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