The PC will only boot into Mga

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The PC will only boot into Mga

Postby rodgoslin » May 17th, '21, 13:15

I'm not sure whether this is a subject for the Mageia Forum, but it is Mga that I'm trying to load. This is the situation.
I have a newish PC, a Lenovo ThinkCentre m75-s, that I've previously used to test out alternative OS'es. Not being a Windows fan, I deleted the installed Windows and devoted the whole drive to Linux systems. I've recently decided to establish this as an Mga sytem as a backup to my main desktop machine. Currently it's running Mga7. The machine has always been a bit iffy as to booting uo from DVD, sometimeds going straight onto the HDD, even when a DVD is fitted into the internal DVD drive. Now, the situation seems to be permanent. The machine will not boot from DVD at all but , Whilst the DVD is working, the activity light is flashing, the machine goes on to the Mga intro screen. The bios is setup with (now) both ithe internal DVD drive, AND a USB DVD drive with no visible change.
Please do noot suggest I use the update option which the machine is urging me to use, since, in this case, I wish to re-visit Mga 5 and 6, before moving upwards.
As I said, I'm not sure whether this is a subject for this forum. The general impression is that the bios is not dwelling on alternative boot options long enough for the specific drive to begin to operate, so the bios sweeps on to the HDD option. Which being an SSD is pretty brisk.
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Re: The PC will only boot into Mga

Postby doktor5000 » May 17th, '21, 16:14

Is it booting in legacy or UEFI mode? Also, if you press F12 for the boot selection, are the DVD drives listed there? If you let it sit there for a few seconds or a few more, and then select the DVD drive in question, does it boot?

Do you have another system so you can confirm that the DVD itself in question is bootable? Did you try to write the DVD image to USB drive and boot that, does that boot ?
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Re: The PC will only boot into Mga

Postby sturmvogel » May 17th, '21, 16:16

It does not really solve the problem with your DVD-Reader, but if you want to update your installation with a offline media you could try it with an USB-Stick.
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Re: The PC will only boot into Mga

Postby rodgoslin » May 18th, '21, 07:57

the machine is booting in EUFI mode, as it has in the past. Both options for booting frm DVD drives (internal and USB) have been moved to the top of the boot sequence. Both options for booting, internal and USB both respond to the boot call by lights and sound, but the machine appears to ignore this and movesa on to booting from the HDD, and the Mageia splash screen comes up and further action simply boots up into Mga7, as normal. If it were possible to introduce a delay, it might hold back the initialisation by HDD, unti the other sources have come into play. Since the ThinkCentre has an SSD as the main storage, it is vey fast at getting into the boot sequence, whilst the DVD drives are not. In the past, there have been times when it would boot from DVD sources, but, of late, it does not.
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Re: The PC will only boot into Mga

Postby sturmvogel » May 18th, '21, 12:02

Did you check that in BIOS "Fastboot" is disabled? Fastboot will cause that some periphals are not startet at boot and so the overall start time is lower.
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Re: The PC will only boot into Mga

Postby rodgoslin » May 18th, '21, 14:51

This machine does not appear to have an option for fast boot. Secure Boot is disabled
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Re: The PC will only boot into Mga

Postby doktor5000 » May 18th, '21, 17:33

rodgoslin wrote:If it were possible to introduce a delay, it might hold back the initialisation by HDD, unti the other sources have come into play. Since the ThinkCentre has an SSD as the main storage, it is vey fast at getting into the boot sequence, whilst the DVD drives are not.

What about what I mentioned already:
doktor5000 wrote:Also, if you press F12 for the boot selection, are the DVD drives listed there? If you let it sit there for a few seconds or a few more, and then select the DVD drive in question, does it boot?
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Re: The PC will only boot into Mga

Postby rodgoslin » May 18th, '21, 18:21

Sorry, yes, I did try the F12 option. Oddly, this is something I'd never heard of before. Yes, it did list the drives in the same order as in the normally viewd entry in the bios display. It did, once or twice, allow the DVD drive to boot the machine up into the install programme. When I finally persued the install option, it failed to work. It got passed the initial options, into the install, proper. It failed with no option to go further, with an error message "An error occurred- No valid devices were found on which to create new filesystems. Please check your hardware for the cause of this problem." Allowing the machine to carry out a normal boot, Mageia performed in an entirely normal fashion. I've taken out a ticket with Lenovo support, but judging by the extemely awkward and complicated fashion of registering a problem, I'm not altogether sure that I'll get any sensible suggestions back from them. I'll wait until either they reply, or a realistic time for their reply passes, then I'll probably close this instance.
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Re: The PC will only boot into Mga

Postby benmc » May 19th, '21, 22:23

so it will boot from the DVD if it really has too.

you can use this to boot up a local non-Live.iso you have locally on your system if you want to create a new install.
The non_Live installer DVD image when booted, uses a slightly modified net-installer to start the install.
you can break into this and then point it to your non-Live local.iso. just make sure the local.iso is not on the partition you want to write to.

this will get rid of any mechanical issues with the DVD loader assembly, the disc itself, and, also the install, by running off the SSD, will be lightning fast.
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Re: The PC will only boot into Mga

Postby rodgoslin » May 20th, '21, 02:21

"I'm sorry, I'm afraid I can't do that", as Hal would say..A bit of background. Straight after my first PC, I've always built mine from scratch, and been happy with it. I've always run two machines, one with my active Linux, from Mandrake on, and one to play on with other distros, beta's and to evaluate the latest in my preferred line. On the decease of my "lets try this" machine, I decided to go out and buy one, ostensibly to try out the new SSD option. Hence the Lenovo ThinkCentre .I pitched off the Widows 10 installed and rebuilt to try Mga 8 beta's. Later, I decided to rebuild as a semi mirror of my main desktop. I decided to go for Mga 7. I had some misgivings at this. I have Mga 7 on a Lenovo ThinkPad, but it got little use. On building Mga 7 on the Think Centre, I noticed that a fair chunk of the SSD was still formatted for Windows. So opted for the new install to go for using the whole of the disk. All went well, and the thing now runs Mga 7. Now the snag. On a longer evaluation of Mga 7, I don't like it. No refletion on Mageia, I'm more than happy with that. It's KDE, in it's later versions are what I dislike, and that on Mga 7 particularly. That's the reason why my main machine (This one) is still running Mga 5.. It would seem that my present problems stem from this latest install.
Whilst I still have the install iso's for the earlier Mga builds, I've not been able to locate a boot.iso for the mga 5 netinstall.
As an aside on things now topical, I'm not very happy at the miniscule storage fitted into off-the-shelf- PC's. Both my self build units ended up with 4TB disk drives, and keeping inside those once generous limits has always been a chore. The Antec cases that I built them in had four slide-in HDD housings, and at one time I had them all filled, with a power and SATA connections switch, which allowed me four separate operating systems within the same case. I'm increasingly thinking of going back and repairing the defunct machine, and junking the modern offerings.
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Re: The PC will only boot into Mga

Postby benmc » May 20th, '21, 02:42

ok.

so, if you just copy a Mga5/6 Classic Install .iso onto a usb stick, does the existing Mga7 see the stick when you plug it in? (note - copy, not burn)

if it does, you can boot to your DVD, interrupt the installer bootup at the right time (by ejecting the disk), then point the (net)installer to the USB stick.
no need for an extra partition. if you are using a USB3 device and port, nearly as fast as your SSD for install

regards

PS.

just had a thought as to why your DVD boot (Mga5?) failed where it did.
your SSD firmware may not be supported by the earlier kernel series, but by the time Mga7 was released, the firmware drivers were in the kernel.

you could perhaps bodge a Mga5 install with a Mga7/8 kernel.

install a MGA 5 using another computer and HDD/SSD. add the Mga7/8 kernel. reboot to the Mga7/8 kernel. clone the drive to your Lenovo and see if it will boot up correctly.
if all good, just keep a look out for new kernels, (as you should have disabled the Mga7/8 repos you got the kernel from, you dont want to upgrade to Mga7/8) you will have to add them manually
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Re: The PC will only boot into Mga

Postby rodgoslin » May 20th, '21, 05:42

Hi, benmc. You were entirely right about the inability of mga 5 to handle an SSd.I tried the Mga 8 beta install DVD and it wiorked fine. It seems that for Mga 5 it was simply a PC build too far. I could, I suppose look into replacing the SSD with an HDD. I believe that the ThinkCentre comes in two versions SSD and HDD. So should work. Or, perhaps better get doen and repair the old machine. I'm really getting too old to be grovelling in the guts of a full tower PC case. where you can see what you're doing, or feel what you're doing, but not both.
I did try, for luck, putting the install files on a USB stick, and it worked fine up to a point. That point was when you needed the mouse, which was not enabled.
I think it will have to be back to the torch, tweezers and grope, in the Antec case. The other problem, on another thread, the inability for the bootup to mount the SMB/CIFS drives, sems to have no solution so far.
Cheers for now.Rod
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Re: The PC will only boot into Mga

Postby filip » May 20th, '21, 19:05

Good luck, Rod.
BTW. you can install several installs on the same SSD or HDD. I do that for more than two decades. I label the partition by install name (Mageia 7 for example) to avoid any confusion. I sometimes use help to visualize all partitions on all drives with GParted. Great, versatile tool in my experience.

I used KDE for a very long time. Nice and polished feeling for many years. But unstable occasionally and different with almost every version. To the point I switched my fresh mga6 install to XFCE soon after mga6 came out. Very happy user since. On my desktop and Raspberry Pi.
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