[clue] new computer part 2

[Collins Richey]

Just a refresher. I put up a new computer with a MB is a gigabyte
880GA-ud3h MB, AMD PhenomII cpu, 8G
memory. I have a pair of 1TB hardrives in radi1 setup (on-board raid).

After lots of startup pains, I now have a usable system, but you may
find some of the quirks quite interesting if frustrating.

1. No system in the boot phase can use the USB keyboard (Grub, menu
choices for an installer DVD, etc.). Once a real kernel has been
booted, the keyboard works just fine..The same thing applies to grub
text menu choices booted in a VM, but the grub gui menu works just
fine. More about VMs below.

2. The only DVD that I had at had that would actually load and run to
install an OS is Mint13, so that's the base I'm running now. Due to
some quirks in the Mint (I presume Ubuntu) installer, I had to redo
the installation several times.

3. Initially I tried setting up the harddrive with a simple /boot and
root partitions plus an extended partition with swap space. Most of
the drive was left in free space. The installer liked that, and I very
soon had an OS on disk, but ... the Mint installer destroys free
space!!! When I checked the drive, I found that it had rewritten the
extended partition with only the amount of the space in the one
defined logical partition, ie remainder of the drive was now not
usable. Super bummer!

4. Another attempt with a couple of unused logical partitions produced
the same results.

5. Finally I repartitioned the disk with all space used in several
logical partitions. This time the installer went into a loop after
writing the system to disk! After I loaded the Livecd and mounted uo
the /boot and / partitions, it appeared that the system was ready
except that /boot/grub was empty!!! The disk partitions were correct -
all space would be usable.

6. What I have to do was to setup for a chroot to the new disk system.
Mount / and /boot correctly, bind mount /proc /sys and /dev into the
system, and then chroot. I was then able to rung grub2 grub-mkconfig
and grub-install. I also had to create a password for root and create
my own user. After that I was able to boot the new system and apply
(lots) of updates.

7. After a little googling, I was able to install all the components
for kvm/qemu, and now I have three new virtuals running - a debiian,
centos6. and my old favorite pclinuxos..The only problem remaining is
to get sound working in the virtuals.

Life goes on.

--
Collins


-- 
Collins Richey
     If you fill your heart with regrets of yesterday and the worries
     of tomorrow, you have no today to be thankful for.