My old PC failed catastrophically today. My local repair shop said the power supply failed, also fatally damaging the motherboard. The shop kindly gave me another machine which had basic function, so I transferred my Linux SATA drive to it and tried to boot into my openSuse 13.2.
I should mention that I also needed to transer my nVidia graphics card to the “new” machine. (nVidia’s proprietary drivers were previously in place).
The machine started OK and I got grub’s normal list of kernels, which I let default to the latest. The boot seemed to be running and the “fade in green” splash screen started. But nothing further happened. On hitting esc I saw that it was just showing “Reached target paths, reached target Basic System”.
I hunted around and at one point got a dracut# prompt, but can’t seem to get back to that now.
It’s since occurred to me that my current setup is (apart from the graphics card) expecting a quite different motherboard and processor to the ones it now finds, and my original expectation was rather naive. But any help as to how I can renedy this situation would be gratefully received.
Hi
At the grub menu press the ‘e’ key to edit your boot entry and add nomodeset on the line that has quiet in it and you should find it will boot. Add the graphics card and should boot fine without nomodeset.
No linux and the kernel will add the required drivers, doesn’t matter that it’s a new motherboard, cpu etc. The only issue may be things like soundcard (Go into YaST soundcard and re-configure), network firmware, wireless card. But it should boot up fine.
When you say press e I assume you mean when I can see the grub boot list of kernels. When I do that the cursor jumps to the bottom of the screen where the “boot options” for the current kernel are listed. For me that currently shows only “vga=0x31a”, no mention of quiet. I added nomodeset here and continued, but the result was the same, no GUI.
Can I assume (apart from the odd possible exceptions you mentioned) that the linux system is now running, but just can’t start the xwindows environment?
When you say press e I assume you mean when I can see the grub boot list of kernels. When I do that the cursor jumps to the bottom of the screen where the “boot options” for the current kernel are listed. For me that currently shows only “vga=0x31a”, no mention of quiet. I added nomodeset here and continued, but the result was the same, no GUI.
Can I assume (apart from the odd possible exceptions you mentioned) that the linux system is now running, but just can’t start the xwindows environment? If so, I would have thought I could switch to the shell on a terminal, but I can’t.
I also tried removing the video card and instead connecting up the vga onboard graphics to the monitor. The system probes for the nVidia card, fails to find it, and goes into an endless loop looking for the nVidia board. Is there a grub boot option which tells the system to ignore the nVidia drivers and just use native graphics?
5 Years ago this happened to me. What I had to do was to disable the onboard graphics in the BIOS. Which resulted in the NVIDIA card getting the PCI-ID it had on my old machine and got it all back to work.
If that doesn’t help, or your BIOS doesn’t allow it, remove the NVIDIA card, boot the system and remove all traces of the NVIDIA card, i.e. installed driver packages etc. Next put it back in, but do not connect it to the monitor, and post output of
Not at home at the moment so can’t check if the BIOS will disable onboard graphics. But as I tried to explain in my last post, if I remove the nVidia card the system won’t boot, so I can’t try your other suggestions.
Without NVIDIA card can you boot to using the nomodeset option that should disable the NVIDIA driver and use fall back drivers. Disabling the Intel chip in the BIOS is the ultimate answer to use the NVIDIA
No I can’t. nomodeset doesn’t seem to help, and the whole nVidia thing is disguising a more fundamental issue.
So I’ve made a 13.2 installation/boot disk and booted from that. It did an installation analysis and decided it couldn’t offer a workable configuration. I had a quick look at the “expert partitioner” and it found all the various partitions, but of the 3 Linux partitions only “swap” was labelled as such, it didn’t seem to know which were “boot” or “home”. 8
You’re right, the partitioner has an option to import any existing mappings it finds, and it has identified the root and home partitions. It’s asking to update them accordingly, but also wants to format the root partition at the same time (presumably as part of a clean version install) but I’m not inclined to do that just now.
Excellent! That has got the machine going again. Was starting to think the power/motherboard failure had corrupted the drive. (Maybe it did, and the update install fixed it?)
Thanks all, for your help. Never failed by this forum!
