Rebuilding Ubuntu on a Mac
Background
My last story was about rebuilding ubuntu on a Silverstone RM420
20-bay disk farm. Yesterday (10 Apr 2017) my two regular Ubuntu
systems died, and this is the story about trying to recover from
that disaster. The two systems were a. An old 21" iMac called
'echuca', and b. a 3-year old Acer Aspire S7 called 'lilydale'.
This is particularly sad, as these two systems represented my
attempts to wean myself of MacOSX and back to Unix, but it seems
my Ubuntu Linux wanted to orphan me - often!
I thought at first I might have been hit by a virus, but both
failures were brought about trying to upgrade the system
software, in the case of echuca, installing the GNOME window
manager, and in the case of lilydale, upgrading from Ubuntu 15
to Ubuntu 16.04. In the latter case, I started the upgrade and
left it to run, only to find when I came back an hour or so
later, that the screen hd gone blank (so I had no idea where it
had got up to), and would not reboot.
Echuca offered a little more (?) insight - the install
completed, and the system worked while running the Ubuntu window
manager, but as soon as I logged out and back in again,
selecting the GNOME window manager, the system crashed, and then
would not reboot. The boot seemed to OK up to the point where
it said "starting the User Manager for user 127", but then it
just hung at that message.
12 Apr 2017
Tried booting from Linux build CD using the 'alt' key to get to
the EFI dialogue - but could not see the disk in the list of options.
Tried booting from a MacOSX build disk using 'c' key - it
rattled the CD drive, then timed out, and attempted to boot from
system disk, giving the same User Manager error as above.
Tried booting from an Apple backup disk - success, but could not
restore from this disk, as it said 'not the same computer' Huh???
So how are to supposed to recover from a fatal hardware
failure that requires replacing the computer?
Tried booting from on old external disk - this worked (hurrah!),
and gave a usable system, but then how to get recover files from
the Linux ext volume? (They were backed up, but not the latest
copies.)
Used the left shift key to get into GRUB and 'e'dit the menu, as
per the instructions at
http://askubuntu.com/questions/132965/how-do-i-boot-into-single-user-mode-from-grub
. Changed the line linux
/vmlinux-4.4.0-66-generic.efi.signed
root=/dev/mapper/echuca--vg-root ro init=/sbin/upstart to
... ro single, and ran this.
This generated two messages, Loading Linux 4.4.0-72-generic
... Loading initial ramdisk ... then stopped.
Booted into recovery user mode and ran several checks such as
fsck, network, etc, then ran as root in single user mode, and
tried apt-get upgrade. Ran for several minutes
fetching files. then reboot. It generated a login prompt, but
accepted no keyboard input. so reboot again. Back to Started User
Manager for UID 127 message!
reboot with alt key. no GRUB. Tried again, and ran recovery
mode. This got me a single user root mode, but no network.
Back to recovery mode, turned on network, then into root, from
whence I su'ed into user ajh and was able to rsync all the
recent files to another computer (dimboola, running Mac OSX.
Restarted echuca using the external drive, and then rebooted
into target disk mode. Connecting dimboola and echuca via
firewire then meant I could do a complete disk clone (taking
just under 11 hours!), and giving me a now bootable Mac OSX
system on echuca, having blown away the Linux image. The first
time boot did involve a huge amount of disk traffic, which took
forever. Not sure if this is a good thing. We shall see.
It was OK. The disk traffic was Spotlight re-indexing the disk.
14 Apr 2017
More stuff on fixing echuca after cloning:
Need to fix the hostname (System Preferences -> Sharing -> edit)
Need to fix all the .ssh directory entries for echuca
Need to fix the X11 pull downs for remote terminal connexions
Don't forget to change the value in ~/machine (used by various scripts)
15 Apr 2017
Tried rebooting with alt key to install Ubuntu. Both DVD disk
and USB stick mounted. rEFI boot menu appeared, with Standard,
recovery, and two USB icons appearing. Clicked left hand USB
icon, DVD disk accesses heard for a few minutes, then - nothing.
reboot with alt key. This time, no USB icons!
reboot alt again, this time with neither USB stick or DVD
mounted. As expected, just two icons, rEFIt, and recovery
10.8.5. Plugged in USB stick, and USB icon appeared after a few
seconds. Clicked it. GRUB menu appeared. Selected 'install
Ubuntu'. Nothing happened.
Waited 2 minutes, still nothing, rebooted into MacOSX, plugged
in earlier (15.10) USB stick (which did appear on desktop), and
rebooted, no alt key. rEFIt menu appear, but no USB.
reboot with alt, and only Standard icon (labelled rEFIt) and
Recovery icon appeared. Grrrr! Clicked the Standard icon,
different rEFIt menu with Linux icon appeared. Clicked Linux
icon, message 'Boot error' appeared.
Tried same thing again, this time selecting 'Boot
EFI\BOOT\BOOTx64.EFI from' icon. GRUN menu. selected 'install
Ubuntu'. Kernel panic, 'no controller'
Ditto, with DVD inserted. EFI boot now appears. Still went for
rEFIt icon. 'Boot error' again.
Ditto. EFI boot icon selected instead. GRUB. Went for 'try Ubuntu',
same panic.
Ditto, no USB stick only DVD. now no EFI boot icon! Selected
rEFIt icon, went for Standard boot into MacOSX and gave up.
16 Apr 2017
Made a 16.10 USB boot using dd to copy the iso image, as follows
Last login: Sat Apr 15 12:18:32 on console
You have new mail.
Welcome to dimboola!
ajh@dimboola /Users/ajh 501 $ diskutil list
/dev/disk0
#: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER
0: GUID_partition_scheme *1.0 TB disk0
1: EFI 209.7 MB disk0s1
2: Apple_HFS Standard 999.3 GB disk0s2
3: Apple_Boot Recovery HD 650.0 MB disk0s3
ajh@dimboola /Users/ajh 502 $ diskutil list
/dev/disk0
#: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER
0: GUID_partition_scheme *1.0 TB disk0
1: EFI 209.7 MB disk0s1
2: Apple_HFS Standard 999.3 GB disk0s2
3: Apple_Boot Recovery HD 650.0 MB disk0s3
/dev/disk2
#: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER
0: FDisk_partition_scheme *16.0 GB disk2
1: DOS_FAT_32 LINUX 16.0 GB disk2s1
ajh@dimboola /Users/ajh 503 $ sudo umount /dev/disk2s1
Password:
unount(/Volumes/LINUX): Resource busy -- try 'diskutil unmount'
ajh@dimboola /Users/ajh 504 $ diskutil umount
Usage: diskutil u[n]mount [force] MountPoint|DiskIdentifier|DeviceNode
ajh@dimboola /Users/ajh 505 $ diskutil umount /dev/disk2s1
Volume LINUX on disk2s1 unmounted
ajh@dimboola /Users/ajh 506 $ sudo umount /dev/disk2s1
umount: /dev/disk2s1: not currently mounted
ajh@dimboola /Users/ajh 507 $ sudo dd if=/Users/ajh/Desktop/ubuntu-16.10-desktop-amd64.iso of=/dev/rdisk2s1 bs=1m
1520+0 records in
1520+0 records out
1593835520 bytes transferred in 371.895299 secs (4285710 bytes/sec)
ajh@dimboola /Users/ajh 508 $
Did not work: 'isolinux.bin missing or corrupted'
Tried building a 16.04 USB stick:
Last login: Sun Apr 16 13:19:12 on console
You have new mail.
Welcome to dimboola!
ajh@dimboola /Users/ajh 501 $ diskutil list/dev/disk0
#: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER
0: GUID_partition_scheme *1.0 TB disk0
1: EFI 209.7 MB disk0s1
2: Apple_HFS Standard 999.3 GB disk0s2
3: Apple_Boot Recovery HD 650.0 MB disk0s3
/dev/disk1
#: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER
0: FDisk_partition_scheme *16.0 GB disk1
1: DOS_FAT_32 16.0 GB disk1s1
ajh@dimboola /Users/ajh 502 $ sudo umount /dev/disk1s1Password:
umount: /dev/disk1s1: not currently mounted
ajh@dimboola /Users/ajh 503 $ sudo dd if=/Users/ajh/Downloads/Ubuntu/ubuntu-16. of=/dev/rdisk1s1 bs=1m
ubuntu-16.04.1-desktop-amd64.iso ubuntu-16.10-desktop-amd64.iso
ubuntu-16.04.1-server-amd64.iso
ajh@dimboola /Users/ajh 503 $ sudo dd if=/Users/ajh/Downloads/Ubuntu/ubuntu-16.04.1-desktop-amd64.iso of=/dev/rdisk1s1 bs=1m
1443+1 records in
1443+1 records out
1513308160 bytes transferred in 348.370901 secs (4343957 bytes/sec)
ajh@dimboola /Users/ajh 504 $
Also did not work, same message: 'isolinux.bin missing or corrupted'
Tried the USB on echuca:
