Hi Folks,
I got it into my head to install Ubuntu 12.04 Server AMD64 on machine I
ciobbled together from an ASRock A330GC mini-itx motherboard, 2GB
Kingston RAM, a 500GB Samsung SATA hard drive and a Lian Li mini-itx case.
Before I go on, it's possibly worth mentioning that all of this kit ran
Ubuntu 10.04 Server quite happily some time ago, before being
disassembled and put away in the loft.
Anyway, I reassembled to machine, downloaded the binaries and fired up
the install, which went along merrily until it was time to reboot, after
which the machine wouldn't POST. This wasn't immediately obvious because
of the ASRock splash screen, but after a while I managed to get past
that to the boot messages, which revealed that the machine would hang
immediately after it posted a message about the first hard drive and its
S.M.A.R.T. status (disabled).
Puzzled I looked into the BIOS to see if there was anything set in there
that was upsetting it, but no changes to how it saw the hard drive made
any difference.
After that I tried another similar Samsung hard drive with a fresh
install, some different SATA cables and even a different power supply,
all to no avail.
In fact, the only way I could get the machine to boot was to remove the
hard drive and then boot off a USB stick using the original install
media or, latterly, Puppy Linux.
That was yesterday. After sleeping on it I decided delete all of the
partitions on the hard drive and retry. The machine booted (using Puppy
again) and the hard drive was visible once more. For laughs I decided to
try 'something else', which in this case happened to be Debian 6.0.6
AMD64 xfce+lxde, which installed, rebooted and is playing nice in the
dining room as I type.
Since I ideally wanted Ubuntu Server on there I am tempted to get hold
of 10.04 and try that again, then dist-upgrade it to see if it
introduces the same issue.
Failing that I am happy to bung Debian on there, but before I do
anything I'd be interested to hear any thoughts on this.
Sean
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