The IDE hard disk of my old IBM R50p laptop failed, so I replaced it with a new IDE SSD (model PA25-32). I booted with a Fedora 28 LXDE live USB stick and installed Fedora 28 to my new SSD. When I try to boot, the system displays just one dot (a period) in the top left corner and hangs. I have to use the power button to reboot from that situation.
When I boot again with Fedora 28 LXDE live USB stick, I can see that the files in the new SSD are intact. I tried to re-install GRUB several times, but I get always the same results, except if I use option "--disk-module=native" then boot hangs but it displays two dots! In the live USB stick I can see that the SSD is in LBA48 mode: [ 10.059225] ata1.00: ATA-9: PA25-32, 20150807, max UDMA/133 [ 10.059228] ata1.00: 62377984 sectors, multi 0: LBA48 The BIOS of my R50p is 1RETDIWW (3.14 ) and EC is 1RHT71WW-3.04. The BIOS is dated 20 Jan 2005. As far as I know, the EC (Embedded Controller) firmware is the latest possible and the latest BIOS was published 18 Jun 2007. The BIOS change logs do not show any changes to booting or handling disks. I have written details of my struggle to FedoraForum.org posting: https://forums.fedoraforum.org/showthread.php?319160-Boot-displays-just-one-dot-and-hangs It seems that booting proceeds the longest time when I use "--disk-module=ata" but it still hangs! My theory is that when I install GRUB (with the live USB stick), the disk is in LBA48 mode. But when the system is booting and loading parts of GRUB, the BIOS is not using LBA48 mode. So the disk geometry is seen in different ways during installation time and booting, which causes GRUB to read garbage and the system hangs when executing that carbage??? Any ideas? How can I debug this? Regards, Juhani Jaakola _______________________________________________ Help-grub mailing list [email protected] https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/help-grub
