Blacke screen after fresh install

[arcull]

Hi. I tried to do a fresh installation on the new disk while keeping the current one on the old disk intact. Installation went smooth through, but it ends with black screen with only mouse pointer on the screen. I waited for about 20 mins butt still no progress what could went wrong here? Then I decided to hard reset but on the new disk there was no grub and so no possible boot from this disk. Ok then tried to go through entire installation precedure again check everything twice in the paritioning section and again installation ended with black screen and a mouse pointer. So I swithed to my old disk in bios and tried to boot from it, but the X didn't start it ended in cli mode, even entering manually startx didn't help, it replied "no screens found" or smth. like this, but if I select fail safe in grub the X starts ok and I have my kde back. Any ideas what went wrong and why new installation won't complete as it should? I intend to phisicaly remove the old disk after I successfully complete the new installation, so I need it just to copy data from it. The biggest mistery is why the new installation won't complete, grrr Any suggestion much appreciated, thanks

[caf4926]

If you switch graphics to vesa that would do it. But actually you should look at configuring your graphics first if possible, you can do this from Failsafe OK.

Maybe all you need to do is install the correct driver ati/nvidia? other?

[arcull]

I'm still strugling with this thing. So far I managed to get kde of the old installation working with reinstallation of nvidia drivers. However problem with fresh installation still remains, but is somewhat different. When I got new disk I decided to make partitions with gparted, so I thought that suse may not have liked that. So I deleted all created partitions and created them again with suse during installation. This time the installation completed successfully with kde running. Momentary I was pleased everything went ok, but after I rebooted pc, I got stuck at the same point I was with previous installation attempt, that is the new disk is not bootable. Therefore I susspect grub did not manage to write it self to mbr. Grrr ....any ideas why there is not mbr on my new disk? Thanks again.

[caf4926]

Follow the principle of this:
Partitioning/Install Guide - openSUSE Forums

[arcull]

Thanks for the suggestion caf4926, but unfortunatelly that doesn't help me solve my case. During installation I have explicitly seleted that the grub should go to mbr of the disk and the installation completes ok, however after reboot there is nothing on the disk that could be booted from. If I switch to my old disk in bios, run the old installation and manually mount any partition of the new disk to a certain mount point, I can see data is there...well I can not verify that everything is in it's place, but I suppose it is, since the installation went ok. The true trouble seems to be the mbr. I got a suggestion from a collegue that it could the bios of mobo with it's antivirus protection preventing any writes to mbr of disks, however I haven't seen any such feature in bios that could be swithed on/off. Another suggestion I got is that maybe mbr of the disk isn't somehow "ready" and therefore needs some kind of activation. So I'll try to get some tool to check mbr. Anyway any new suggestions are always welcome, thanks

[caf4926]

But. When you select grub to MBR of this troublesome disk, like this:
http://files.myopera.com/carl4926/albums/671478/19.png

When you get back to the install summary, make sure under 'Booting' it is STILL showing the correct HD and to MBR.

Other considerations are:
Are these both SATA
PATA/IDE
or a combination

If both SATA it might be necessary to plug the disk you want to boot from in the first SATA socket of the Mobo. Double check then the boot order.

If a combo, the IDE drive should still be set to Master with the Jumper. Check the boot order to have the drive you need first.

[arcull]

I finally got the source of the problem and is somehow hardware related. I currently have 3 disks, the new one (on which I want to place a fresh installation) is SATA and is connected to the first of 4 sata chanels. While both of the old two disks are ATA and are connected to a RAID controller. I don't need any of raid functionality, the only reason for buying a RAID controller was the lack of connections on my mobo. The new mobos have just one ATAPI channel on which I connected DVD player and DVD recorder. So what I found out is, that if any of the two old hard drives is connected on the raid controller that prevents booting from the new SATA disk. I know it sound strange but that's the way it is. I tried to physically disconnect both old disks and I can successfully boot the new installation. But If I connect any of two old disk back to RAID I can not boot the new installation. By the way the boot order in bios is set correctly. So I gues there is no other way but removing both old hard drives . Thanks for your help anyway.

[arcull]

I'm thinking of another solution, but don't know yet if possible. The idea is to install grub into mbr of one of the disks connected to raid. But don't know yet how to make grub load system which lies on another disk (in my case ona SATA). If anyone has a suggestion I would be very grateful, thanks again.

[arcull]

Hi. I did get some further with my case, but still no proper success. I tried to install grub to mbr of one of the old disks on raid controller and told him to boot installation on my new sata disk. This is similar to using a diskete to boot os. I used commands.

find /boot/grub/stage1

to find grub menu.

root (hd0,1)

because hd0,1 is where my grub menu was.

setup (hd1)

to install grub loader to the mbr of the second disk. However no success even this way. Further I thought that there may be some conflicts on the mobo, and there really were, raid controler and pci sound card did not like each other very much and after manual assigning IRQ 10 to raid controler...waw then new installation (sdc1) on sata disk became bootable. Here is my current fdisk -l output.

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sda1   *           1        4001    32138001   83  Linux
/dev/sda2            4002        9651    45383625   83  Linux
/dev/sda3            9652        9964     2514172+  82  Linux swap / Solaris

Disk /dev/sdb: 122.9 GB, 122942324736 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 14946 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x0868ad31

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sdb1   *           2       14946   120045712+   f  W95 Ext'd (LBA)
/dev/sdb5               2        7474    60026841   83  Linux
/dev/sdb6            7475       14946    60018808+  83  Linux

Disk /dev/sdc: 750.1 GB, 750156374016 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 91201 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x0006df67

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sdc1   *           2        4700    37744717+  83  Linux
/dev/sdc2            4701       18015   106952737+  83  Linux
/dev/sdc3           18016       18928     7333672+  82  Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/sdc4           18929       91201   580532872+  83  Linux

Now in kde I tried to manually mount partitions of other two disks (sdb and sda) in konsole and they mounted successfully and I could see data on them. However this is not how the story ends... of course I wanted that paritions of old disks mount automatically on booting, so I tried to add entries in /etc/fstab, I tried using both default ID and UUID of devices and tried to

mount -a

afterwards to see if it was ok. But after I rebooted pc the suse began to load but it got stuck somewhere in the middle of the process, leaving me with the black screen and the mouse pointer. That is exactly what happend during my very first installation attempt, bucause at that time I selected to mount my old disks (sdb and sda) and after installation went through suse could not mount them. So I booted to singel user mode and commented out the new entry via vi and voila the system could boot again completely. Here are some of my /etc/fatab attempted entries

/dev/disk/by-id/ata-SAMSUNG_HD752LJ_S12UJDWS303466-part3        swap    swap    defaults 0 0
#/dev/disk/by-id/ata-SAMSUNG_HD752LJ_S12UJDWS303466-part1       /       ext3    acl,user_xattr 1 1
UUID=b54a2ee1-8589-4f8b-87e4-f0297f41cd57       /       ext3    acl,user_xattr 1 1
/dev/disk/by-id/ata-SAMSUNG_HD752LJ_S12UJDWS303466-part2        /home   ext3    acl,user_xattr 1 2
proc    /proc   proc    defaults 0 0
sysfs   /sys    sysfs   noauto 0 0
debugfs /sys/kernel/debug       debugfs noauto 0 0
usbfs   /proc/bus/usb   usbfs   noauto 0 0
devpts  /dev/pts        devpts  mode=0620,gid=5 0 0
#192.168.1.10:/home/Kanin_backup        /media/Kanin_backup     nfs     defaults 0 0
#192.168.1.10:/mnt/sdb5/Downloads       /media/Rombon   nfs     defaults 0 0
#/dev/disk/by-id/ata-Maxtor_6Y120L0_Y33HFSEE-part6      /usr    ext3    acl,user_xattr 1 2
#/dev/disk/by-id/scsi-SATA_Maxtor_6Y120L0_Y33HFSEE-part6        /usr    ext3    defaults 1 2
#UUID=20332fdd-148b-4b16-af10-9a0899d6f593      /usr    ext3    defaults 1 2

Things are getting a more clear now. So the initial problem was the conflict on my mobo and now to avoid further situation I did pull out from my mobo:
-raid controller
-pci sound card
-dvd reader
-dvd recorder
...and connected all 3 disk on my mobo. The old two ones attached on IDE channel and the new one on one of SATA channels. So now I have a bootable system on sdc disk but can not add any new entries to fstab to auto mount old 2 disks.. Ok I can mount them manually from console after I get in to kde. I really got stuck now with this thing. It appears to me that IDE and SATA disk combination are not somehow supported by suse or at least don't know how to make them work together. I even thougt of bying a IDE -> SATA adapter to conect my 2 old disks directly to SATA channels, but 'm not sure it will be any better. This is getting a reall head ache now and would very appreciate any new advice from you. Thanks again.

[arcull]

I've solved it, so I thougt of letting you know in case it may be usefull for someone. As mentioned in previous post the problems were 2. The first was some hardware conflict between IDE raid controller, pci sound card and new SATA disk (or more probably onboard SATA controller), that was preventing from booting from new SATA disk, (it looked like no installation was on the disk). I've solved this with manually assigning IRQ to both PCI cards (IDE raid controller and sound card). The second problem with automounting old IDE disk was somehow related to paritions on the disk. On one of the old IDE disks that I was trying to auto mount, there were no primary partitions, just one extended with two logical partitions in it. The solution was to delete all partitions on the disk and to create 2 primary partitions. Now pc is booting ok and auto mounts the old disk without problem.