Old computer won't boot after formatting hdd, installing Puppy

[jeffep]

Old computer based on Intel core duo 2. Installed Ubuntu successfully but would fail to boot and drop out into grub. Using DVD live boot in puppy, I Reformatted disk with first 300m as boot with ext4 and the rest a partition with ___ and loaded puppy in the boot area.. Bios does not have option to choose UEFI or any secure boot options. Using tools, determined that it still chose grub for the boot, so changed it to MBR. Everything looks good but when booting it just sits there with a blank screen and blinking cursor until it fails. Ran smartctl and the hard disk passes all tests. Why won't the computer act on the MBR?

[geo_c]

So you're saying you formatted the internal hard drive with 300Mb ext4 partition, installed grub to it, and a puppy install.

I'm not clear how the rest of drive is formatted.

I don't know which puppy you are using, but first of all 300Mb is probably too small to install the puppy from and run it. That's going to need at least a couple of GB to save changes persistently.

Also, now that I'm thinking about it. How did you install the puppy? Did you use Ubuntu to copy the files from an iso?

[mikewalsh]

Old computer based on Intel core duo 2. Installed Ubuntu successfully but would fail to boot and drop out into grub. Using DVD live boot in puppy, I Reformatted disk with first 300m as boot with ext4 and the rest a partition with ___ and loaded puppy in the boot area.. Bios does not have option to choose UEFI or any secure boot options. Using tools, determined that it still chose grub for the boot, so changed it to MBR. Everything looks good but when booting it just sits there with a blank screen and blinking cursor until it fails. Ran smartctl and the hard disk passes all tests. Why won't the computer act on the MBR?

Hardly surprising, TBH. Nothing of that generation did; UEFI was in the very early "blue-sky" stage at that point in time, and was still being dreamed-up and turned into a working reality. It certainly wasn't commercially installed by any manufacturer in the late noughties.

On top of this, I could be wrong, but I believe Canonical are finally beginning to drop support for MBR booting, and have in fact made the last couple of releases so that they will ONLY boot via UEFI. Sign o' the times, unfortunately; Core2Duo machines have been a staple of the Linux landscape for many years, but modern, "mainstream" Linux is finally moving on & steadily leaving them behind.

There's still plenty of smaller, more lightweight distros around that specifically target those with older hardware.

Mike.

[jeffep]

Sorry about a mistake: I formatted the first 300mb as vfat - since puppy install only searched for vfat. The last 2.2gigs are ext4. Searching online shows at least one other person having problems installing on core duo. I set the first 300 for grub and grub.conf and copied the system on the second partition.

[williwaw]

Jeff,
it sounds like your are trying to set up a UEFI type boot onto a machine that only needs a MBR boot. Are you trying to keep a Ubuntu install in another partition? More details on your disk layout would help. surely it is bigger than 2.5 G, maybe thats all the space you have available outside the Ubuntu install. Puppy can coexist inside a Ubuntu install also

If you are dedicating the disk to puppy and only need MBR, how about installing grub4dos?

What OS are you working from to do disk partitioning. do you have a puppy USB?

[geo_c]

Sorry about a mistake: I formatted the first 300mb as vfat - since puppy install only searched for vfat. The last 2.2gigs are ext4. Searching online shows at least one other person having problems installing on core duo. I set the first 300 for grub and grub.conf and copied the system on the second partition.

I've run puppy from core duo and never had issues.

What puppy install routine were you using? There are a couple, one designed to install to windows partitions, therefore probably looking for vfat.

It would be helpful to see how your drive is arranged. Can you screenshot gparted and show the drive, explaining what's on it?

[jeffep]

Thanks for your input.

I may have had a SATA problem or something. I downloaded Fedora install and while trying to install it I told bios to not consider the floppy drive as part of bootup, to get rid of a pesky 'floppy drive not found' error, press f1 to continue. I successfully installed the Fedora and it ran without problems. As I really wanted to run proxmox, I installed that over the Fedora install and it's still booting up fine.
Not sure if it was a power issue on the SATA or just a plain SATA issue, but telling bios to forget the floppy worked. Info for posterity.