- This topic has 5 replies, 2 voices, and was last updated Dec 28-3:47 pm by roland.
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roland
Dear friends,
I have 2 very similar PC builds, almost identical regarding hardware and software installed. Both have very similar dual cpu (socket R) mainboards, the same SD/USB readers, the same lan cards, and the same SATA expander cards giving 4 extra SATA-3 ports. Both have dual Xeon cpus, one PC having somewhat faster spec than the other. The main differences are:- one has 32g ram the other 16g ram, one has 5 HD drives the other 4 HD drives.
Both have been running antiX 19.3 without difficulty for months, and are always kept up to date.
Then I decided to add an SSD drive to the earlier, slower PC as a boot drive, and install antiX 21 on it, reserving the new SSD for antiX and system use. The install went well, after manually creating the partitions on the new drive that I calculated might suit my needs. I retained the original antiX 19.3 for the time being, booting from its original drive. So the Grub menu now shows 2 boot options, antiX-19.3 and antiX-21.
Both PCs when booting 19.3, boot and load up rapidly as they have since first built. However when I select antiX 21 on the earlier PC, the boot is slowed down by the production of a very long list of SATA error messages as you can see from the screen shots I attach. However once booted (after 5 minutes) the system appears quite normal, and runs as it should.
In the Bios I have almost all settings defaulted except for boot priorities/options, but I decided on sequential drive run-up because of the number of physical drives present on both PCs. I tried reverting to default here without improvement.
Looking on the www for these error messages I find that they may relate to some SATA handling problem, but the many posts looked at seem to differ in what is produced and in the suggested cause. I have not tried any of the proposed solutions as they are related to other distros, and my specific case seems directly related to the latest install of antiX 21, the other PC with very similar hardware configuration does not produce these SATA boot errors when booting 19.3.
Has any other antiX 21 user experienced this problem, and can suggest a way around it?
I attach inxi-zv8 for the slower PC running 21 and 19.3, and for the later faster one running 19.3 only. Also screenshots of the boot errors produced when booting 21 from the earlier slower PC.
Thanks in advance for all contributions.
ps can anyone advise where I can locate the current and historical boot log files?
- This topic was modified 1 year, 5 months ago by roland.
- This topic was modified 1 year, 5 months ago by roland.
- This topic was modified 1 year, 4 months ago by christophe. Reason: marked solved
Anonymous
Hi roland,
On your inxi for antiX-21 noticed it is showing the first ssd drive 128gb as a gpt partition
table and the antiX-19.3 one is mbr. Did you change bios for gpt to boot/install 21?roland you wrote:
I attach inxi-zv8 for the slower PC running 21 and 19.3
after closer looking these 2 inxi are from 2 different machines, I don’t see the inxi
for the slower machine running antiX-19.3 only 21 with the new ssd.roland
These are the inxi-zv8 listings for the 3 installed systems:-
inxi_zv8_antiX_19.3a is for the faster and later build which is very similar to the slower earlier build but does not produce these error messages.
inxi_zv8_antiX-19.3b is for the slower earlier build, and which slowly produces a long list of error messages on booting 19.3 from an HD.
inxi_zv8_antiX-21 is for the slower earlier build which also produces a long list of error messages on booting 21 from an SSD.There are 2 different but very similar machines. One is free of this error message trouble, running 19.3 booting from an SSD. The other produces these error messages booting either 19.3 from an HD, or 21 from an SSD. But when the boots complete, the sytems appear to run quite normally.
These 2 machines are somewhat hardware limited and I think require kernels in the 5 range, limiting my choice.
I apologise if my post created confusion.
I don’t really know why I set the SSD partition as GPT rather than MSdos. I had a discussion with Xecure recently about my inability to install 19.3 on a laptop I use, and he suggested GPT for that instance, and I got the impression that would allow more flexibility in numbers of partitions available. I had to revert to 17.4.1 for that laptop, installing 19.3 proved impossible given the partitions I created, which work well for 17.
roland
I have now noticed that these error messages are sometimes produced during the boot of antiX, and are mixed up with the routine progress and advisory messages coming from the various stages of the boot. Does this perhaps signify that they are being produced by the bios? Maybe it I make selected changes to certain bios settings I can throw more light on things?
roland
This problem is now resolved. Finally suspecting it to be hardware-related, I unplugged and cleaned every cable connecting the 5 hard drives, both power and SATA signal cables, and reconnected with great care, improving the routing of the cables wherever possible. The problem has now completely disappeared. As you can see the case contains a festoon of cables, and I did not have them best routed as I have changed parts of the build such as the new stack of hard drives, which I made to accommodate the 5th drive which is an SSD. I have found that the SATA signal cable is somewhat stiff and quite able to resist being pushed right home until the latch engages. Curiously some of the errors reported related to SR0, which is the dvd/rw, but that too is connected by a pair of SATA signal cables, so hardly surprising really. Another lesson well and truly learned! Put it together properly!
- This reply was modified 1 year, 4 months ago by roland.
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