Installation on old Asus X52D

DasJott

My wife has this old machine we wanted to refresh with Solus, replacing the old Ubuntu.
Booted just fine from USB stick and the live system ran smooth and perfect.

Installation took a few minutes and finished successfully.

Rebooted the machine and ended up in a black screen with a blinking cursor. That's all of Solus.

There is no Secure Boot to switch off in BIOS, UEFI is activated and it should just run. But it doesn't.

Any ideas? Thanks in advance!

DasJott

Will try to install it again this evening. Maybe the complete automatic installation didn't work out.
Also I will try to get into terminal (Alt+F1) when encoutering the black screen with a blinking cursor.

Anything else, I should try?

brent

I see this problem with new computers and kernel compatibility etc but almost never see this problem with Solus on older computers.
Once you tty go through the gamut of eopkg repair commands. Please see:
https://getsol.us/articles/troubleshooting/installation-issues/en/
and
https://getsol.us/articles/troubleshooting/general-troubleshooting/en/

sudo eopkg up -y (full system update)
sudo eopkg check | grep Broken | awk '{print $4}' | xargs sudo eopkg it --reinstall (checks and fixes all broken packages)
sudo eopkg rdb (rebuilds database)

If your problem is not package-related, there are still toubleshooting ideas in those links. Good luck.

DasJott

Nope. No console, no desktop, nothing.
On this machine Solus is a black screen with a blinking cursor.
Very clean, intuitive, but lacks of usability 😆🤷🏼‍♂️

Tried everything in BIOS, tried to change things on uefi partition... Nothing.

I just wanted to bring Solus to my wife, but it shall not be. Strange but true.

kaktuspalme

DasJott I would try booting it with nomodeset and then do all the updates from tty.

brent

DasJott I just wanted to bring Solus to my wife

A unique Valentine's Day gift indeed🙂

Sorry to hear no console. USB sticks can be finicky so if you burned your .iso the Solus way (https://getsol.us/articles/installation/preparing-to-install/en/) you can always try to reinstall it. I've often gotten it right the 2nd or 3rd time.

DasJott

kaktuspalme
How do I get to a point to set that?

brent yess 😁 for the Valentine's day 😁

I already installed it twice. The second time for making manually sure the partitions are assigned correctly.
Directly after the Asus logo there is the black screen with no possibilities at all. 😩

DasJott

I went to live again and mounted the efi volume.
/loader/entries/Solus-current-5.4.12-144.conf seemed to take options, so I added nomodeset there.
Guess what... Solus is still black with a blinking cursor...
I think I'll give up.

kaktuspalme

DasJott That's normal but you should be able to go to the tty using ctrl+alt+f2.

brent

If changing USB sticks doesn't work (that's worked for me in the past)..

then go into live usb and open gparted and take screenshot of what your solus install drive looks like--someone would be able to get you in the right direction.
I am not a partition guru but this thread (https://discuss.getsol.us/d/4602-are-fixes-coming-for-the-installer-issues) has some parallels to your efi and installer issue.

DasJott

...of course I can not give up that easily 😃

The USB Stick is the same I used on my work laptop. I found another thread somewhere with the same error described and finally it was a damaged hdd. Even if it installed seemingly correct, it didn't boot after install there.

So, as it is only 50€, I ordered a new hdd (sdd to me more precise) which is delivered tomorrow. Will try again then with high hopes 😁

The partition table meanwhile is quite easy:

512MB UEFI Fat32
4GB Swap
Rest of the 500GB as ext-4 on /

On second installation I assigned the second one to swap and the third one to / while the first one was grabbed by the installer itself. Live system works perfectly and installation runs just fine.
Let's see what a new hdd brings.

I really appreciate your help very very much! What a warm and nice community Solus has 🙂

brent

kaktuspalme That was so obvious of course I failed to bring it up. DasJott Did you try ctrl+alt+f2 as the install was booting up (before it settles into a blinking cursor)? You omitted the CTRL from your description of your attempt.
**disclaimer: not sure the f2 is a constant for everyone.

But hey, an affordable new SSD is all good, too! 🙂
edit: a little more clarity hopefully

meinherz

I would try during the installation (in legacy mode) to delete all the partitions and create them again. You can do it without swap partition, just create a swapfile in the root of the system partition after installation.

DasJott

Indeed I tried ctrl+alt+f2 but it did nothing. Thing is, the Asus splash displays and with no delay there is the black screen with the blinking cursor.
It seems it gets stuck even finding the place to start on the hdd...

Let's see what this evening brings with a new harddrive. I am very curious!

DasJott

What a good day. The SSD arrived today and it fit perfectly. So far so good.
It booted from USB and I went through the install, using full automatic partitioning.
The installer said, it would create an EFI partition,a swap and the root partition.
On reboot I was a little surprised, that it in fact didn't create a UEFI partition and came up with grub 🤔🤷🏼‍♂️
Who cares, it booted! Right now I'm installing the recent updates and am happy 😁!

Gentlemen, it was a pleasure to work this out with you ☺️!

It was an old hdd that simply is broken.

brent

DasJott Gentlemen, it was a pleasure to work this out with you

Likewise.
Enjoy your new operating system.
Somewhere deep inside you know all the things everyone here discussed were irrelevant, and that you had a hardware issue (dying platter disk).
Great instincts: you played your hunch.

DasJott

My wife and me, we are really exited. Once it was installed, it simply worked. Everything worked.
She put in the Wacom tablet, started up Gimp and it simply works!
It sounds so simple, but we all know Linux... I must say, this is the first Linux which simply does what it is supposed to do. Never experienced that on Linux before 😄
Really love Solus so far - on my working machine as well as on that 10 years old machine, which now experiences a new life...

DasJott

Can anyone add the solved tag? I don't seem to be able to do so...