Installing Slackware 15 (and 14.2), trouble with disks/booting, and kernel panics (and perhaps 'secureboot' issues).
by Feanor from LinuxQuestions.org on (#6CWK0)
Hello forum.
It's been a while since my last visit - Slackware usually stays out of the way and does it's duty reliably.
Here's the (longish) story:
I recently lost my coding/archive management job to automation and deep learning and 'AI', but received as a parting 'gift' some old office workstation towers that have become 'legacy' in terms of their needs but are plenty powerful enough for me. I was warned that some of them don't have CPU's for their motherboards, or dodgy graphics cards, etc, but that there should be enough good parts to build one or two solid machines.
So the first one i tried had a working Windows 10 install and simply needed a graphics driver update and all was working fine. I figured I would keep this machine on Windows and perhaps be able to play some of my old boxed games long abandoned since I went linux only many years ago, and perhaps gets some video editing going. This initial experience was my first proper Windows experience in many years (my last windows was XP, which I used to dual boot with Slackware... 12? - I've used slackware with no major trouble since v8 on a number of different machines over the years). Anyway, my short experience with Windows 10 justified my abandoning of all things MS. The first game I installed, J. Jacksons' King Kong nuked the installation, the reboot required to install it was never recovered from - the machine entering an endless 'auto repair loop' that I had no patience to solve. Various checkpoint recovery attempts were useless, and each boot led to a degradation, and eventually I just got a mouse cursor on a black screen with nothing happening.
So I tried to install Slackware 15.0, which I was slightly hesitant about, since the 15 tarot card presages travail (I don't use tarot cards, but these things have a tendency to prove themselves out).
I've been using a combination of Slackware 13.37 at work and 14.2 at home with much success, but a need to upgrade some compiler elements beyond what 13.37 supported led to a test of 15.0 at work, which installed fine, but I found it slow on the hardware I had at the time, and the additions to KDE somewhat overwhelming and confusing initially. But it worked, and given some reading about technicalities of 'SecureBoot' and such things lead me to prefer the newer OS for my new at-home experiment.
Anyway, after finding my Slackware 15 USB installer was corrupted by time, I made a new one, and began my attempts to install it on the old windows 10 machine.
My first trouble was using cfdisk to set up partitions: the new list of file system types is confusing to me, and i was not able to set the bootable flag on the relevant partition as I usually must. I wonder if this is some artifact of the 'secureboot' thing?
Eventually I got to the point of completing the install, but could not do what I usually do at this point - using LILO to install to the MBR, which has always worked fine for me since ancient days. There seemed to be a long pause during this step, and I'm not sure if it would perhaps sit indefinitely until I press a key - if I do press enter, the installation contines, setting up network etc.
When I finish the install and reboot, I cannot get the OS to come up no matter what i do with the various BIOS priority stuff (I hate these newfangled graphical bios pages...'progress' we do not need).
I can get the OS to boot using the USB stick, and use the command...
boot=huge.s /dev/sda1 blah blah, and then the intalled OS starts booting, but I get a kernel panick (which are incredibly rare in my experience) complaining about 'unable to load VPS on unknown block' or something like that.
So I gave up with 15.0 and created a 14.2 (my favourite slack so far, after 13.37) usb installer, and repeated the process, only to end up in the same situation: no booting unless I trigger it with the bootable usb (ie. the bios won't load the correct partition) and a different kind of kernel panic.
So, thats the story, sorry it's so long.
Any tips, for how to proceed? What extra info will help diagnose? My attention span for tech difficulties is getting much less these days, and what little I read of the 'secureboot' fiasco makes me want to go back to pen and paper for ... everything.
Here's what specs I can extract easilty:
MSI 990FXA-GD65 v2 with "Military grade" branding
say 'MS-7640 VER 3.1' below the above on the board
4 x Corsair vengeance RAM
Asus 6600 Video card
https://www.amazon.in/MSI-990FXA-GD6.../dp/B00IYH9CNM
https://www.msi.com/Motherboard/990F.../Specification
https://www.phoronix.com/review/msi-x99a-workstation
Thanks,
Feanor
It's been a while since my last visit - Slackware usually stays out of the way and does it's duty reliably.
Here's the (longish) story:
I recently lost my coding/archive management job to automation and deep learning and 'AI', but received as a parting 'gift' some old office workstation towers that have become 'legacy' in terms of their needs but are plenty powerful enough for me. I was warned that some of them don't have CPU's for their motherboards, or dodgy graphics cards, etc, but that there should be enough good parts to build one or two solid machines.
So the first one i tried had a working Windows 10 install and simply needed a graphics driver update and all was working fine. I figured I would keep this machine on Windows and perhaps be able to play some of my old boxed games long abandoned since I went linux only many years ago, and perhaps gets some video editing going. This initial experience was my first proper Windows experience in many years (my last windows was XP, which I used to dual boot with Slackware... 12? - I've used slackware with no major trouble since v8 on a number of different machines over the years). Anyway, my short experience with Windows 10 justified my abandoning of all things MS. The first game I installed, J. Jacksons' King Kong nuked the installation, the reboot required to install it was never recovered from - the machine entering an endless 'auto repair loop' that I had no patience to solve. Various checkpoint recovery attempts were useless, and each boot led to a degradation, and eventually I just got a mouse cursor on a black screen with nothing happening.
So I tried to install Slackware 15.0, which I was slightly hesitant about, since the 15 tarot card presages travail (I don't use tarot cards, but these things have a tendency to prove themselves out).
I've been using a combination of Slackware 13.37 at work and 14.2 at home with much success, but a need to upgrade some compiler elements beyond what 13.37 supported led to a test of 15.0 at work, which installed fine, but I found it slow on the hardware I had at the time, and the additions to KDE somewhat overwhelming and confusing initially. But it worked, and given some reading about technicalities of 'SecureBoot' and such things lead me to prefer the newer OS for my new at-home experiment.
Anyway, after finding my Slackware 15 USB installer was corrupted by time, I made a new one, and began my attempts to install it on the old windows 10 machine.
My first trouble was using cfdisk to set up partitions: the new list of file system types is confusing to me, and i was not able to set the bootable flag on the relevant partition as I usually must. I wonder if this is some artifact of the 'secureboot' thing?
Eventually I got to the point of completing the install, but could not do what I usually do at this point - using LILO to install to the MBR, which has always worked fine for me since ancient days. There seemed to be a long pause during this step, and I'm not sure if it would perhaps sit indefinitely until I press a key - if I do press enter, the installation contines, setting up network etc.
When I finish the install and reboot, I cannot get the OS to come up no matter what i do with the various BIOS priority stuff (I hate these newfangled graphical bios pages...'progress' we do not need).
I can get the OS to boot using the USB stick, and use the command...
boot=huge.s /dev/sda1 blah blah, and then the intalled OS starts booting, but I get a kernel panick (which are incredibly rare in my experience) complaining about 'unable to load VPS on unknown block' or something like that.
So I gave up with 15.0 and created a 14.2 (my favourite slack so far, after 13.37) usb installer, and repeated the process, only to end up in the same situation: no booting unless I trigger it with the bootable usb (ie. the bios won't load the correct partition) and a different kind of kernel panic.
So, thats the story, sorry it's so long.
Any tips, for how to proceed? What extra info will help diagnose? My attention span for tech difficulties is getting much less these days, and what little I read of the 'secureboot' fiasco makes me want to go back to pen and paper for ... everything.
Here's what specs I can extract easilty:
MSI 990FXA-GD65 v2 with "Military grade" branding
say 'MS-7640 VER 3.1' below the above on the board
4 x Corsair vengeance RAM
Asus 6600 Video card
https://www.amazon.in/MSI-990FXA-GD6.../dp/B00IYH9CNM
https://www.msi.com/Motherboard/990F.../Specification
https://www.phoronix.com/review/msi-x99a-workstation
Thanks,
Feanor