Fast story: After I restarted my laptop. I met critical error, I tried to LiveCD-boot from Ubuntu (to repair GRUB with it), but when I try to try it without installing, try to check memory, try to check disk. It prompts me these errors:
http://oi59.tinypic.com/2hg8mrt.jpg
http://oi58.tinypic.com/2ecmdsz.jpg
Please, help.
What does the boot-repair disk say ?
What does the boot-repair disk say ?
Absolutely nothing, I cannot start LiveCD because it gives same error, I cannot install it, anything. If you mean this one:
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Boot-Repair
I can't get access to terminal, because it doesn't even load Ubuntu. It doesn't load anything.
You don't need a terminal if you burn the disk from here http://sourceforge.net/projects/boot-repair-cd/files/
I have it booted up, choose for x64 (being 64-bit as my processor is 64-bit), after 2 seconds, I was almost happy because I thought it would solve it, but after 5th second, still nothing happened, after about 20 seconds (edit: okay, 70 seconds, anyway, it was a medium time), this showed up instantly, no delay:
http://oi60.tinypic.com/2pt4c3r.jpg
I was mistaken, I was able to start memory (RAM) test (memtest86+) from Ubuntu's bootable LiveCD (not from current one, but just regular Linux Ubuntu LiveCD downloaded for official website). It said there were 0 errors. And error is complaining about not being able to save into the memory... now I'm really in the dark.
It could be HDD, but it should be able to boot without HDD or with broken one.
It could be motherboard, but then, I wouldn't be able to interact with first modals of Ubuntu, like, at all.
It could be RAM, but I checked it, no errors were shown and correct data displayed (about RAM).
I really, don't know anymore.
If you are booting a recovery or live CD/DVD/USB drive, the system hard drive will not be mounted. Since you seem to be getting similar errors in these cases, you either have a memory or motherboard/CPU problem.
This looks like a pretty serious problem. Are you sure that you were able to boot into that LiveCD before? Not being able to boot with a LiveCD that you once was able to boot with means that there is something seriously wrong with the hardware. The fact that you get a kernel panic during the boot with the LiveCD suggests that as well.
Make sure that the LiveCD that you are using is correct and that it should work (i.e., that this exact same LiveCD (not just same "version", but the same physical thing, disk or USB, unaltered) has worked before for that particular computer, and that it is currently working when you try it on another computer). The point is that you must make absolutely sure that the LiveCD should be working, beyond a shaddow of a doubt.
The only other piece of software involved is the BIOS. But I think that you should get an error earlier if that was broken (it shouldn't even reach the kernel booting sequence). In that case, doing a factory reset of the BIOS might help. You can first try doing so through the BIOS menu, and if that fails, try doing so through the hardware jumper, which is much trickier and only recommended as a last resort.
If all of this fails, then you definitely have a pretty serious hardware failure, that is, a problem with either the CPU, the RAM, or the motherboard / chipset, because those are the only components required for successfully booting of the kernel. Those types of problems are pretty hard to recover from. Maybe you can try to swap out some RAM sticks if you have any handy, but that's about it (and given that the screen and boot sequence seems to execute OK, until the panic, might indicate a defective RAM stick). But before you do something like that, try to see what repairs can be done through the manufacturer's services / warranty.
This looks like a pretty serious problem.
Dammit!
Not being able to boot with a LiveCD that you once was able to boot with means that there is something seriously wrong with the hardware
(Assuming normally downloaded .iso file from Ubuntu's website, I'll be using Googled pictures, it might not look precisely same, but it's same menu, same screen etc.). I was able to get Ubuntu into USB, boot from it, what happened, it showed me
http://doc.ubuntu-fr.org/_media/installation/live_cd_maverick1.png?cache=
When pressed enter, it asked for langauge:
http://i.stack.imgur.com/ZKC9O.png
After chosen language has been selected, menu showed up:
http://cdn5.howtogeek.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/07/image67.png
From now on, every single option will lead me to errors I posted, except for "Test memory", it gave me 0 errors. "Boot from first harddrive" just rebooted computer to LiveCD from start.
What happens without any bootable devices, is it shows me "grub rescue", which I managed to make display grub boot manager (from HDD), it showed me 1 Ubuntu installation, 1 Windows installation and couple usual Ubuntu options, but whatever has been chosen there, makes it same result, when I choose Windows, (it's Windows 7), it shows me "Starting Windows" screen, with shining logo, nothing else appears. Worth noting, I had about 4 Ubuntu installations and 2 Windows ones...
But I think that you should get an error earlier if that was broken (it shouldn't even reach the kernel booting sequence).
Keys as F12 (boot menu) and F2 (setup utility) work just fine, I know it's not all about BIOS, but, at least that's working.
You can first try doing so through the BIOS menu, and if that fails, try doing so through the hardware jumper,
There should be warning called "your screen will display 4 times the same". After I "defaulted" my BIOS to death (dark dumb joke), it showed me regular Toshiba logo (as it did just as I first started already preinstalled Windows 8), but, there were two of them, it looked like I had to monitors on top of on another, it freaked me out, when grub rescue> part appeared, there were four "copies" of it. 1 perfectly clear, 3 somehow wrongly rendered (all of them different way).
Edit: It's back to normal after I again started laptop.
Maybe you can try to swap out some RAM sticks if you have any handy, but that's about it (and given that the screen and boot sequence seems to execute OK, until the panic, might indicate a defective RAM stick).
I checked RAM (by Ubuntu liveCD), it didn't show any errors. Although tomorrow one of people I know, will possibly bring 2GB, should be enough.
But before you do something like that, try to see what repairs can be done through the manufacturer's services / warranty.
Just asked, warranty is over :(.
So what, now I have to throw that laptop away?
If you plug that LiveCD into another computer, are you able to successfully boot with it ("try ubuntu without installing")?
When you downloaded the iso, did you verify that you got the correct MD5 and SHA hash numbers?
Given how far you manage to get with the LiveCD, the problem does not seem as serious as I first thought.
If you can get into grub rescue (from HDD), then you should be able to check the logs of the last boot attempts. There are a number of log files available in the /var/log folder of your root partition (it might take a few tries to find it, as grub rescue is very primitive). In grub rescue, you can look for the root partition by doing this (your outputs will vary):
grub rescue> ls
(hd0,4) (hd0,3) (hd0,2) (hd0,1)
grub rescue> ls (hd0,4)/var
... some kind of 'not found' message
grub rescue> ls (hd0,3)/var
... some kind of 'not found' message
grub rescue> ls (hd0,2)/var
backups cache ... local log ... www
And then, you can show the contents of the log files with cat (hd0,2)/var/log/<file> where <file> would be the name of the log file you want to check. Normally, the main log file of interest when it comes to boot errors is the /var/log/dmesg file, because it contains all the kernel messages (which is basically what you have in your first pictures on this thread).
The reason why looking at those logs can be useful is because the errors that you have posted are just kernel panic stack traces, which are not particularly useful in figuring out what the root of the problem is. What you need to look for in the logs are things that report errors (normal errors, not panics) and whatever was the last thing that was attempted before the kernel panic occurred. If you are lucky, this will give you a pretty clear indication about what is actually wrong. For example, it could be a defective peripheral (e.g., network card, USB port, etc..) that crashes any attempt to boot. If that's the case, you could try to unplug / replace that peripheral, and that would fix the problem. At the very least, the logs are where you will be able to find out where the problem comes from, whether it ends up being fixable or not, hopefully it is fixable.
If you plug that LiveCD into another computer, are you able to successfully boot with it ("try ubuntu without installing")?
Yes, it does boot normally for else's computer.
When you downloaded the iso, did you verify that you got the correct MD5 and SHA hash numbers?
No... but is it necessary?, if it works on another computer why wouldn't it on mine?
Given how far you manage to get with the LiveCD, the problem does not seem as serious as I first thought.
Great.
Grub rescue command block and kernel panic traces and command exeuction
http://s0.uploads.im/evBlE.jpg
Directly after this: when I type cat (hd0,msdos5)/var/log/dmesg. I get error Unknown command 'cat'.. File dmesg does exist, it's on 2nd row third "word" from the right.
For example, it could be a defective peripheral (e.g., network card, USB port, etc..) that crashes any attempt to boot.
As you mentioned it, I reminded something myself, before this occured, I was wililng to install Windows 7 on a USB from already installed Windows 7 (wanted to wipe current installatio and create fresh one), I sought for applications which would be able to see which drivers I use and save them in a folder. I found DoubleDrive (http://www.boozet.org/dd.htm), I choose fo AHCP (?) fan, video driver and two network drivers (ethernet cable and Wi-Fi, Qualcomm, Atheros). I thought it would create ready installers for new Windows installation, instead it just copied strange .inf and .cab files. Maybe it didn't copy it, it moved it, and maybe made devices somehow useless? I thought this might be useful to know.
With commands:
grub rescue> set root=(hd0,msdos5)
grub rescue> set prefix=(hd0,msdos5)/boot/grub
grub rescue> insmod normal
grub rescue> normal
I was able to move to Grub loader where I found one Ubuntu and one Windows installation, Windows gets stuck at it's shining balls (childish joke). At Ubuntu, when chosen, screen remains dark for about 30 seconds, then Ubuntu logo shows up and behaves as nothing happened, it just loading with the three dots changing from white to orange (regular Ubuntu boot-up screen), in correct resolution and everything. I was almost happy I fixed it, but, after 10 seconds after it appeared, it changed back to text-mode and it showed me following errors:
http://i.imgur.com/w3UDmCq.jpg
So GPU seems to be working just fine.
Is there no program that would test devices one by one. Firstly it'll check HDD, then it'll check RAM, then it'll check CPU, then etc. that would require not a lot to boot up? (to avoid booting errors)
That picture shows that ubuntu booting has fallen back to a busybox shell, see the message:
BusyBox v1.21.1 (Ubuntu 1:1.21.0-1ubuntu1) built-in shell (ash)
Enter 'help' for a list of built-in commands
(initramfs)
This is a stripped-down Linux shell environment that is more powerful than grub-rescue, but does not require a full boot of Linux. An ash shell is just a basic version of bash (the terminal command interpreter used by most Linux distributions). In that shell environment, you should be able to use commands like cat (that wasn't available in grub-rescue) or even less, which should allow you to inspect the dmesg file and other log files to see what went wrong.
Is there no program that would test devices one by one. Firstly it'll check HDD, then it'll check RAM, then it'll check CPU, then etc. that would require not a lot to boot up?
Yes, that program is the BusyBox shell that got started as a result of the failed boot. It should give you sufficient "power" to inspect the logs and probe kernel modules. If you look at the commands available under BusyBox, you will see that it provides everything you need, like cat and less for file reading, dmesg, lsmod and modprobe for probing kernel modules (drivers) and logs, fdisk, fsck and mount for checking / mounting HDD partitions, and even wget and dpkg for downloading / installing debian packages (wget to download, dpkg to install, and use ifconfig / route to configure network connection, and it also provides ftp commands to copy files in and out of your computer to an ftp server, so that you can look at them in a more comfortable environment, like on another computer).
Think of BusyBox as a minimalistic Linux distribution that loads up only the bare minimum and then provides you with all the necessary commands to load up the rest manually (and see what fails to load up). This is, of course, some pretty low-level Linux kung-fu, but it's not that hard (when I had a similar problem on an embedded system, I managed to learn it as I went along and ended up solving the problem).
My classmate works at IT shop. He brought Windows 7 Professional x86 CD and new cheap harddrive 80GB. I changed it with my current one (I asked him if he could check whether he could retrieve most vital data that I need (less than 1GB), so I can't really execute commands until day after tomorrow. He won't change a byte.
I really have no idea what happened. When he tried to do it at school, i.e. getting important data out of my HDD, he used Windows, with TuneHDD, HDDTune, something like this, my HDD didn't show up at all, it didn't show up at Windows Explorer as well.
When he booted from Linux Ubuntu (which he had on his own SSD [internal]) and plugged in my HDD through USB, his computer started dropping on performance and finally stopped responding, even when we distached my HDD.
I'm not best with hardware, but my theory would be that I somehow messed HDD so badly up, that when I tried to boot Linux from LiveCD USB, it tried to scan for HDD and SSD and made kernel hang up because of something (just like it crashed his Ubuntu).
I have now 80GB, he took my 750GB drive, he'll try to dump all NTFS (Windows) partitions into .zip's òr .iso's. I'm currently on this computer that hasn't worked.
I seriously have no idea how possibly can HDD make computer crash (and make every attempt to boot everything else impossible).
The problem is technically solved, but I still need to know, WHAT THE HECK happened?! HOW?!
I had a ssd that corrupted (the data is supposedly still on there, the controller corupted) so I thought perhaps I might try to rescue the data with live CD. The live CD would not boot with the bad drive attached to the computer and gave a number of different errors. I tried booting with a Windows disk and never successfully booted windows. Just my 2 cents. I think it's something with the sata controller, but I could be wrong.
Edit: I never did recover the data, though there may be a way to
I never did recover the data
Everybody backs up!
Just my 2 cents. I think it's something with the sata controller, but I could be wrong.
I screwed up the content of the HDD. When hardware specialist cloned my HDD onto a fresh disk, exactly same error appeared. I'd take a guess that Windows screwed my partitions, again.
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