Forced shutdown always messes up mbr

**Makdadi** · 12-03-2009

This has happened to me so many times in the past that I am ready to pull my hair out. I will install a linux distro, it will be going great and then the computer will lock up for one reason or another.

We all know that these things happen sometimes. I will then have to force it to shut down by holding the power button but when I come back, the drive is unbootable and nothing I can do with a live cd, fdisk, or the setup command in the grub console will fix the problem.

I always end up having to re-install whatever distro I was using and then spend hours downloading all the programs and updates I had on a connection that averages at 14.4 KB/s. Is there an easier way?

Thanks in advance.

**minthaka** · 12-03-2009

You can ask Ubuntu, to ship you a free copy of the installer. I would recommend you to ask for Edubuntu, since it has the largest collection of packages on a DVD. You can order other distros from DistroWatch.com.
Can you describe how those freezes have happened? It's more likely you have some serious troubles with your hardware parts.

**MikeTbob** · 12-03-2009

I agree with minthaka, it sounds like maybe your hard drive is failing or something.

**Makdadi** · 12-03-2009

Well, I wont rule out the possibility of the drive failing because it is about 8 years old but I ran a disk check on it (smart data) that tested just about every aspect of the drive I could think of and it said it was in top condition. It even said that it had only had less than a year's worth of total elapsed uptime, no bad sectors, and everything it tested either got a "good" or a not applicable. I can still access it just fine through the live cd and every time I install a new distro on it, it will work fine.

There is nothing definite about the freezes. In fact, the system runs so smoothly, I only have to worry about this sort of thing once every two months, if that. It can be anything from overheating to an infinite loop somewhere or just x crashing or something. It's not even consistent that I have to deal with the mbr going. It just happens often enough to be really annoying. I hate to say it but as far as robustness goes, I...I think windoze has us beaten...

**minthaka** · 12-03-2009

It will be rather the motherboard or the memory. I had a situation where Linux have frozen system, while the Windows worked well (except the periodical you-never-know-why errors which are present by default). I've installed Linux very well, and after first reboot it crashed. After checking the hardware, it has been shown that there were errors with one of the RAM cards. After the replacing everything worked just fine.

**reed9** · 12-03-2009

It can also be the video card/video drivers. There are some well known problems with intel drivers and xorg freezing. That's mostly been resolved in the newer kernel and intel driver used by Fedora 12, Ubuntu 9.10, etc, but some peopel are still having trouble.

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/X/Troubleshooting/Freeze

If it is X freezing, you could (if you had another computer) ssh into the frozen machine and do a clean reboot.

Check /var/log/Xorg.0.log for error messages.

**Makdadi** · 12-03-2009

Wow! Thanks everyone for the quick responses! Alright, so I was looking around using a live cd and I opened up Palimpsest Disk Utility. In there, when I clicked on the hard drive in question, there was a check box for "make it bootable". I unchecked that, hit apply, checked it again and applied and then, on the next restart, it booted.

Before this next part, I'll just mention I am a linux noob for one and two, I am using Ubuntu 9.10. It gets to the screen just before the loading bar, (the one with a white ubuntu logo on a black background) and then it just shows:

Code:

Ubuntu 9.10 desktop tty1

desktop login:

but flashing rapidly. Followed reed9's advice and looked at Xorg.0.log and it showed:

Code:

(EE) NVIDIA(0): Failed to load the NVIDIA kernel module!
(EE) NVIDIA(0):  *** Aborting ***
(II) UnloadModule: "nvidia"
(II) UnloadModule: "wfb"
(II) UnloadModule: "fb"
(EE) Screen(s) found, but none have a usable configuration.

Fatal server error:
no screens found

Does that mean anything to anyone?

Let me add that at this point, I am able to boot into a shell with no problems so I'm pretty sure it's just X or my video card/drivers.

Thanks again.

**reed9** · 12-03-2009

Presumably you have an nvidia graphics card.

Post the output of

Code:

lspci -v | grep -i vga

Did you install an nvidia driver using ubuntu's Drivers Manager?

Can you post the output of

Code:

sudo jockey-text -l

**Makdadi** · 12-03-2009

Code:

lscpi -v | grep -i vga

gave:

01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: nVidia Corporation NV34 [GeForce FX 5200] (rev a1)

and when I tried:

Code:

sudo jockey-text -l

it said the "jockey" command was not found.

You asked me if I installed my drivers with Ubuntu's driver manager before and I didn't. I downloaded the drivers straight from the nVidia website.

Thanks for bearing with me.

**reed9** · 12-03-2009

it said the "jockey" command was not found.

The text interface is only available in the latest version, which I thought karmic had, but perhaps it needs to be upgraded.
First try

Code:

sudo apt-get install jockey-gtk

That is assuming you have a network connection active.

Otherwise just post the output of

Code:

dpkg -l | grep nvidia

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