On Sun, Oct 30, 2011 at 09:35:23PM +0000, Chris Green wrote:
On Sun, Oct 30, 2011 at 08:33:26PM +0000, Chris Green wrote:
On Sun, Oct 30, 2011 at 05:37:27PM +0000, Tim Green wrote:
On 30 October 2011 13:15, Chris Green cl@isbd.net wrote:
I tried the recovery mode and it looks as if it can't read the SATA disk drive, though obviously the CMOS can as otherwise it wouldn't boot into GRUB at all. It goes through a load of timeout messages and then there's a kernel panic. I was going to try and produce some detail by copying to my laptop but that's waiting for the solution to "Problem 1"!
You might have originally had the disk controller in PATA compatibility mode (or words to that effect) rather than native AHCI. This might not be the problem, but it can certainly send Windows off into the long, blue, grass.
Can you boot off a live CD?
I can certainly try and see what happens.
Booted up OK. I then went back and tried the older kernel versions in the grub menu and the 2.6.32 kernel one worked OK (the latest, non-working, one being 2.6.35).
So I've copied /home off the system and I'm going to install a new xubuntu from scratch, there's virtually no customisation on the system so that shouldn't cause me any problems at all. (famous last words!)
... and it was (famous last words) too! :-(
The installation starts up OK, recognises the hardware, including the hard disk but then gives an error as soon as it tries to wite to the hard disk, it's something like:-
IO error when reading/writing hard disk.
It seems as if kernels up to 2.6.32 work with the SATA controller but ones from 2.6.35 onwards don't. It's a VIA VT2620 controller, I've Googled a bit but have found nothing very significant.