Worse day of my Linux life

fox · October 02, 2017, 07:30:41 AM

That was yesterday. I recently purchased a used 2011 27" iMac (fantastic display), and am planning to set it up as a dual boot with an internal SSD replacing the 1TB HD. (I'm waiting on a thermister kit, which you need to keep the fans from roaring once the original drive is replaced - an Apple "innovation".) Anyway, I'm having two issues: keeping the screen brightness high enough; and getting the system set up on a 480 GB SSD taken from my mac mini. (Can be run on the thunderbolt port until I install it inside the iMac.) Something must be wrong with the drive setup because at the end of the boot sequence I get a black screen and I spent the day unsuccessfully trying to fix it. I also tried cloning partitions to the hard drive, which would work at first and then not when they were reformatted. I wasted the entire day and had nothing to show for it. Today I'm going to try reformatting the SSD (which was giving partition errors in gparted), and clone it from the other drive in my mac mini. I could just install Ubuntu from scratch yet again, but I have a lot of programs and customizations that I want to carry over.

Ironically, before I pulled that SSD, I had a spare 120 Gig SSD, onto which I installed Ubuntu and ran it from the thunderbolt port. Works fantastic; very fast. But I don't want to pull my iMac apart just to install a 120 GB SSD. I tried cloning it to an internal partition and it worked well at first, until I resized the partition and then it wouldn't boot. Ugh.

Jason · October 02, 2017, 09:35:48 AM

That really sucks. Moving an existing OS from one machine to another is usually a PITA. I wonder if you could move it as a VM. I've never tried but I believe you can take an existing bare metal install and make it into a VM or maybe that's only the other way around? Not likely what you want but would be an interesting project.

fox · October 02, 2017, 12:41:37 PM

I'm beginning to suspect that there's something wrong with this SSD. I am cloning it from the smaller SSD inside my Mac mini using Clonezilla; a disk to disk clone. The MacOS partion is less than 100 gb, but it was taking hours to clone. I've never had that happen before. The SSD is made by Crucial and I bought it about a year ago.

Jason · October 02, 2017, 03:19:17 PM

All you were getting was a black screen after the boot manager? No error message or anything?

fox · October 03, 2017, 06:54:09 AM

No error message. I got the Ubuntu startup screen, and then black with a cursor that moved, suggesting a video problem. I can't get out of it with any key combo; I have to force shutdown. I've searched this on the internet and haven't come up with a solution. Others have reported it, but under different circumstances. So odd that it only occurs on the crucial SSD, although if I clone the partition to the internal drive I get it there, too. The SSD that works well is an old OCZ Vertex 2 120 GB SSD. One difference between them is that the Vertex doesn't have a version of MacOSX on it, though I don't see why that should matter. The other interesting thing is that I can run OSX from the Crucial SSD without any problems. Adding further to the mystery, the same Crucial SSD that I have the problem with was previously inside a 2012 Mac mini (Intel 4000 video) and worked well there. The video card in the 2011 iMac I'm trying to run it with is a Radeon 6770.

The reason I'm doing all this is in preparation for replacing the 1TB internal HD of the iMac with an SSD. I haven't done that because I'm awaiting delivery of a thermal sensor kit that allows you to do this without causing fan problems. I suppose if I have to I could leave the drive inside the iMac and run it from the 120 SSD. It is connected via a thunderbolt port, so it's just as fast as an internal drive. I also have another 480 GB SSD in an older iMac that's being sold, so I'll probably try it as well.

ssfc72 · October 03, 2017, 09:07:05 AM

Mike, did you get the 27 " imac, through kijiji and from the Toronto area?
You say it has a Radeon video card, does it have an i7 cpu?

Nice snag!

Bill

fox · October 03, 2017, 05:00:01 PM

Not quite, Bill. This one is an i5, and I got it in Norwood. A 2011 iMac with a beautiful 27" display for $500. And yes, a Radeon card. This is a 4k not 5k iMac.

Jason · October 03, 2017, 05:58:44 PM

Are you using the same type of boot-up on the computer that created the Ubuntu partition to where you're putting it? Are they both EFI? Remember that EFI partitions the drive differently and expects a different partition than BIOS does.

fox · October 04, 2017, 07:13:26 AM

I am.

fox · October 15, 2017, 08:48:49 AM

I tried a new install of Ubuntu 17.10 daily build on the Crucial SSD. At first it was OK, but fairly quickly I ran into problems that kept it from booting. I'm now convinced that this SSD is corrupted and I'm going to see if I'm covered by a warranty. Meanwhile, I pulled a different SSD out of a 2010 iMac that I'm selling to a colleague and put it in the 2011. It is working well with no problems.

buster · October 15, 2017, 12:45:01 PM

" new install of Ubuntu 17.10 daily build"

When I tried this beta in virtual yesterday I had so many problems - long install, forced reboot, unavailability of Synaptic (apparently a known bug), slow graphics, no mouse in TuxRacer, no easy way to alter repositories...... It doesn't seem ready for prime time quite yet.

I would certainly try something a bit more stable before I took hd back.

Edit: I found it very odd to go back to sudo apt-get install ***** to get programs I wanted! Have depended on Synaptic for eons.

fox · October 15, 2017, 01:45:38 PM

I didn't have any of those problems, and I'm pretty sure I had Synaptic working. I think it has to do with the display server. According to this thread, Synaptic works on Xorg, but in Wayland you need to issue a specific command to fix it and the fix only lasts until you reboot.

With reference to my SSD (not HD), I had problems with it running Ubuntu 17.04, so they aren't limited to 17.10.

fox · November 10, 2017, 10:57:08 PM

I finally got around to testing the sectors on the Crucial SSD I suspected was bad; report showed no bad sectors. I have since used it successfully in a Thunderbolt case with a cloned installation of Arch. It seems to work OK. I now suspect that my problems were caused by cloning distros onto it and changing the UUID without making a corresponding UUID change in /etc/fstab. The stuff that you learn playing with Linux

Jason · November 11, 2017, 03:04:10 PM

That's good news even if it took a while to figure it out. Are you saying that Clonezilla changed the UUID? Sorry, I should probably have re-read this thread from the beginning and I'll do that later so don't feel the need to answer right away if it's not a quick reply for you.