A happy-ish experience

[MLA]

Got me a new box -- the Novatech barebone bundle of Intel Core i5 2400 with 4GB memory. Plus Nvidia GT430 for graphics, a SATA disk and a 60GB Corsair SSD. No problems in installing Linux (Mageia 1 -- a fork of Mandriva). And it flies!

So why only happy-ish? There is some subtle problem with the way physical disks are deemed to be ordered, which has some curious effects of one attempts to use the machine to run multiple Linux OS instances. I've worked around it, but not without a lot of head scratching and swearing.

The problem appears to be that at some point during the boot sequence the sda and sdb labels get swapped around as far as the software is concerned. This has the strange effect of even a successful boot sequence claiming that it found sda, comprising sdb1, sdb5... (sic.), followed by finding sdb, comprising sda1, sda5... (sic.)

The net result is that in a multi-boot scenario, grub gets confused to the point where it may not be possible to boot anything at all. The only answer appears to be to have a single /boot partition, shared by all OS instances and to keep all kernel images in there. Pretty messy. I prefer to have each OS to have its own /boot where it keeps its own image, and just have a central grub menu pointing at the right /boot. Doesn't work on this machine -- not with Mageia (or with Mandriva, for that matter).

Not to worry. The performance is just lovely. :-)

[Pendragonuk]

I normally run Linux on a septate box to Windows but I know what you mean about performance. A few months back I installed Ubuntu on my gaming rig. Just to see quite how fast it was OMG it was blinding!

As for the hard drive thing I have seen similar issues. The BIOS says one thing, the physical connections say the same but when you install Linux reverses the sequence!!!

On my Ubuntu desktop I have taken to disconnecting the second drive. Then once it's all installed have the second drive a a folder within the Home directory.

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[MLA]

In fact, there is no issue with the disk ordering once the machine is fully booted. The confusion appears to arise only temporarily at an early boot stage. So you can probably just add a late-boot stage command to mount additional disks.

And incidentally, on my older machine (Intel Core Duo, also a Novatech one :-) ) there is no such problem with exactly the same distro.

As for Windows, not being heavily into gaming, I just run WinXP under Qemu these days for occasional software builds, having otherwise banned Windows from family machines some years ago. Which simplifies life a lot, but also makes for an interesting challenge every time I want to upgrade. It's a shame Novatech official policy is not to offer any Linux compatibility advice, even "off the record" -- I bet you some of their engineers know a thing or two on the subject. ;-)

Mike

[Mike]

My experience is not the greatest in Linux, however have you tried changing the hard drive controller mode? I.e. if it's AHCI swap it to IDE and vice versa? From my limited knowledge I think AHCI is the better one for use with Linux distros compatibility wise? My reasoning is that it'll use different code for detection possibly and that might help resolve this rather odd issue.

[Musthaveittoday]

Nope, the latest Ubungme isn't the greatest effort, try putting it on a memory stick, you'll know pain then.

[MLA]

Nope, the latest Ubungme isn't the greatest effort, try putting it on a memory stick, you'll know pain then.

As it happens, I've just installed Mageia 1 on a memory stick, which was a perfectly straightforward install. That's really only intended for the single user mode troubleshooting, but on the same hardware on which it was installed, I can run it in full windowing mode just fine. Had same experience with Mandriva previously and Mandrake before that. That's one reason I am sticking with this particular branch of Linux distros -- in my experience Mandrake/Mandriva/Mageia are peerless in the ease of initial installation.

[MLA]

My experience is not the greatest in Linux, however have you tried changing the hard drive controller mode? I.e. if it's AHCI swap it to IDE and vice versa? From my limited knowledge I think AHCI is the better one for use with Linux distros compatibility wise? My reasoning is that it'll use different code for detection possibly and that might help resolve this rather odd issue.

Interesting point! No I haven't. Thanks for the tip -- will give it a try.

[MLA]

Interesting point! No I haven't. Thanks for the tip -- will give it a try.

Having Googled it, I think I'll leave AHCI/IDE setting alone -- it would seem I'd have to reconstruct all my initrd images. Too much trouble, given that I have a work-around.

In any case, messing about a bit more strongly suggests that the principal problem is in grub. I've added a grub entry to daisy-chain the menu to itself, and another one to daisy-chain to the same menu on another partition. In both cases I get to the target menu, but every entry on the copy on another partition fails with Error 18: The selected cylinder exceeds the permitted BIOS maximum (or something on those line -- I haven't noted the exact warning, other than the error number). Daisy-chaining to that same menu on the same partition works just fine.

Maybe it's time to bit the bullet and swap to grub2, since grub1 is apparently no longer supported. :-(