[Bglug] Dell Precision 380 - now boots into Linux

[Peter]

Hello Chris:

I got Linux Mint Maya installed and booting - finally.

The box I borrowed from STARS has a SATA (Samsung SP0411C/R, sda, 40 HB 
SATA, 7200 rpm, D0 in BIOS) as well as 2 IDE ( ST3082110A, 80 GB, IDE D4 
in BIOS, and a cd/dvd drive) drives and a 3.5 inch diskette drive. One 
site in my research said that Dell shipped the IDE drives jumpered as 
Cable Select but their installations only worked if they were jumpered 
as Master & Slave. I did not change anything here and I don't know how 
mine were jumpered. The Dell Precision 380 dates somewhere on or after 
2006 but is a nice machine, nonetheless.

The 3.5 inch always showed its light on. I tried the ancient thing of 
turning the connector over (in the days before keyed connectors, having 
the drive light always on was a sign it was on backwards) - no change, 
so I unplugged it and turned it OFF in the BIOS. And I don't have any 
diskettes to try in it, anyway.

The box was not happy if the SATA drive was disconnected and would not boot.

UNETBOOTIN on a USB stick did not work.

I put the Maya cd in the drive and changed the boot order in BIOS and it 
booted OK. Then I installed Linux. All appeared to go well, but it would 
not boot. I tried a System Rescue Disk and a Knoppix disk and I could 
see all the Linux files were on the SATA drive, sda. But no boot. Tried 
the update-grub (I can never remember if it's update-grub or 
grub-update!) but it complained that I was attempting to change a 
read-only file several tries and an error message  which I've forgotten. 
Othere people reported similar messages. Several times it appeared to be 
booting and stopped; hitting ctrl-esc showed the last activity was 
starting the cups printing server. Tried the Boot Repair disk - it 
reported success and finished, but no boot. Note, for the installation 
of Maya, I did the manual ('something else') install and partitioned the 
drive as 100 MB for /boot, 10 GB for /, 5 GB for swap area, and the rest 
as /home. This is my usual process so I can change the OS version and 
not lose my /home files. But I still make a backup just in case when I 
upgrade even though I've never had to use it.

So, I went back to square one, as they say. Put the Maya cd in and ran 
the live version. I deleted the existing partition table and created a 
new one using GPARTED. Then I installed Maya again. This time I told it 
to erase the disk and take it all for the installation, except it wanted 
a swap area, so I gave it 5 GB for that. Installation went OK as before. 
Then, wonders never cease, it rebooted after I restarted it (soft one, 
ie no power off). Then I did the update. Many new files, including 
LibreOffice - is that normal? Shutdown (hard, power off) and reboot. 
Success! Repeated the shutdown/restart several times OK.

In summary: I turned off the diskette drive, made sure the SATA drive 
and the IDEs were plugged in, tried several times with the cd boot 
process and did not pre-partition the drive but let Maya take it over.

If I do it again, I might try putting /home on the IDE drive, but that 
will come much later, if at all. Also, I might try Ubuntu 18, just for 
giggles.

Peter Richards

-- 
Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the the universe. -  Albert Einstein