[clue] new computer part 2

[Dennis J Perkins]

Interesting.  USB is started after the kernel loads, so grub must have its own USB service.  Or maybe Isolinux or equivalent handles it.  I do remember seeing this too and I keep a PS2 keyboard around for that purpose.  I didn't need it to reinstall Arch Linux recently, but I always needed it before.

I've never heard of free space being destroyed.  I do know that cfdisk won't work if the disk was partitioned by a certain partition tool.  

 Sounds like Mint needs to work on their installer.

Collins Richey <crichey at gmail.com> wrote:

>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.
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