On Sat, 27 Jun 2009 21:02:04 +0100
"Chris. Aubrey-Smith" <cas194@???> wrote:
> 2009/6/27 Alan Pope <alan@???>
>
> > 2009/6/27 Paul Stimpson <paul@???>:
> > > If you boot from the Ubuntu 9 CD and use the try it out option does it
> > work? If it does then the distro works and it's the upgrade that's gone
> > wrong.
> > >
> > > If that is the case then I would run off the CD, connect an external USB
> > drive, backup all my documents then do a clean install from the 9 CD rather
> > than an upgrade.
> > >
> >
> > Whilst that's an option, it would be nice to know what the problem is,
> > so that we can feed that back to the developers in case it hits other
> > users.
> >
> > Cheers,
> > Al.
> >
>
> Agreed. I'd rather establish what's happening, rather than simply abandon
> this approach and start again from scratch.... which is why I posed the
> original question...!
>
> C.
I had a similar problem with an old machine (a c.1998 Celeron 400 home
build). With 9.04 it exhibited similar symptoms with the latest kernel
but would boot older kernels. This was temporarily resolved by using
the '386' kernel; however the 386 kernel similarly failed with 9.10
alpha "Starting up" ......., but the older kernels still worked, as did
the Fedora 11 beta live disk.
On this machine, the kernel has always complained that it was not using
ACPI because of the BIOS vintage. I eventually found a newer BOIS (c.
2002 v. 1998), and after the reflash, the latest kernels boot fine and
it runs Jaunty or Karmic alpha just fine.
There's a launchpad bug entry <
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/318470>
which I subsequently closed as "An old bios problem, not a kernel
issue".
If the Dell is of similar vintage, then it may be a similar issue, but
it's really hard to diagnose when the kernel fails that early (and
very annoying when the installer works, but the reboot fails). This
happened on my karmic install, which I recovered by
rebooting from the install disk in rescue mode, and then manually
installing a known good old kernel prior to the BIOS upgrade.
-jh
