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I have a Dell PowerEdge T130 with Ubuntu 16.04.03 LTS that won't boot. It had been working but failed to boot after a power failure.

If I boot the system from a flash drive into "Try Ubuntu without installing" mode I can access the sda disk fine. I'm able to fsck and mount it without any problems.

It has a single 1TB spinning drive. No RAID, UEFI or encryption. No dual-boot or anything, the whole disk is for Ubuntu.

When booting it gets to the grub page fine, then it reports

i8042 no controller found

Apparently that is just a spurious message; if I use edit in grub to have it boot in non-quiet mode it prints something like:

Begin: Running /scripts/local-block ... done.
....[repeats about 25 times]
Gave up waiting for root device
Alert UUID=02480..... not found

It then puts me into initramfs although I'm not able to type anything.

The UUID does match the one I see with blkid when I boot the flash drive.

I've tried reinstalling from the flash drive. Both with and without a separate /boot partition, and with and without LVM. The installation runs fine but the system won't boot. With LVM the local-block script prints something about ubuntu-vg not found (or maybe not active) each time it runs.

The Dell diagnostics run without error. I've updated to the latest BIOS and reset BIOS defaults. The drive shows up in BIOS and is set to AHCI, security freeze lock enabled and write cache disabled.

I ran boot-repair but it didn't help. http://paste.ubuntu.com/26536753

I tried adding rootdelay=90 to grub but it didn't help.

I also tried installing Fedora and Mint but they had the same problem.

Any ideas on how to fix this or what additional info I could collect?

J Prescott
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  • You may do better with 14.04 or maybe 16.04.1. Not sure of 16.04.3 also changed. The stock kernel of Ubuntu 17.04 is doing away with Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) support for a number of ancient graphics processors. 3Dfx Banshee/Voodoo3+, ATI Rage 128, Matrox G200/G400, SIS, VIA, and Savage hardware This was done because they expose insecure APIs to user-space. https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/1680276 – oldfred Feb 07 '18 at 22:58

1 Answers1

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Based on the answer to Gave up waiting for root device. Ubuntu 16.04 I tried burning a DVD rather than using the USB.

This worked fine. After reinstalling from the DVD the system works and boots fine.

I don't understand why DVD vs USB should manifest itself this way but the system is now working.

J Prescott
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