On Mon, Mar 09, 2020 at 04:51:00PM +0000, Anthony Campbell wrote: > On 09 Mar 2020, Otto Moerbeek wrote: > > On Mon, Mar 09, 2020 at 03:56:53PM +0000, Anthony Campbell wrote: > > > > > This discussion is very interesting. The same thing happened to me > > > on 6 March, when after completing the upgrade my Dell Optiplex 3020 > > > refused to boot. I assumed it was a hardware failure and spent the > > > next three days bringing up an older Acer n460 which the Dell had > > > replaced.
yes, it looks like a hardware failure. in my case, 4 hosts with the same motherboard model failed at the same time (I ran sysupgrade via ansible), so hardware failure was a bit excluded. > > > I don't have the facility at present to put the disk in another > > > machine so it looks like I'm stuck. I agree it could be difficult. If the disk is plugged, bios stuck. If the disk is unplugged, bios is fine, but you can't modify the disk data. As sthen@ said, you could try to change bios setting to make the bios to not look at the disk. I dunno if it would work or not. Alternatively, if you disk support hotplugging (sata disk should), try to connect the disk after the bios started could help. If so, I would try to plug it as soon as possible after bios init. Depending your configuration, you could also try to use USB/SATA or USB/IDE adapter (depending your disk), in order to plug the disk after bios init. For me, I had problem with this method too: when my sata disk is plugged in sata connector it is showed with 512 bytes/sector, whereas with USB/SATA connector it showed with 4096 bytes/sector and so disklabel is incoherent. I hope it helps. -- Sebastien Marie
