On Mon, Mar 09, 2020 at 06:47:10PM +0100, Sebastien Marie wrote: | 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.
Indeed it did :) My machine would not POST anymore (Dell Optiplex 9020; dmesg at the end) | 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 only have this one machine that showed the behaviour. Several VMs, my gateway and my laptop worked fine so I didn't really tie it to the bootloader changes (especially since the machine didn't POST). I couldn't boot from any other medium as long as the boot disk (an SSD) was connected; my conclusion was that a failed SSD prevented the system from POSTing (something I've seen in the past with failed HDDs). | > > > 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. I played around with that a little bit, but didn't get to a working machine. | 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. That was a bit of a scary option for me :) | 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. In the end, after reading Otto's mail about reverting his changes, I connected the SSD from my not-booting machine to my laptop and upgraded the snapshot on it. That allowed my desktop machine to boot properly again. I've seen Otto's commit message from earlier today, so I will test out the next snap on my machine tomorrow. At least now I know not to jump to conclusions about failing hardware :) Thanks to Otto for his work on this area; looking forward to running my machine on all-ffs2. Cheers, Paul -- >++++++++[<++++++++++>-]<+++++++.>+++[<------>-]<.>+++[<+ +++++++++++>-]<.>++[<------------>-]<+.--------------.[-] http://www.weirdnet.nl/