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On 10/07/14 18:45, George Parker wrote: > Sorry for the long story. Section 1 is background, section 2 is the > current problem. > > 1. Having been away for 6 weeks consorting with the French and Spanish, > on my return I thought my aging desktop could do with a face-lift. (Nice > to get back to reasonably fast broadband and computer after 6 weeks on a > tablet and smartphone on very unreliable wifi.) I put in a 1 TB drive > and another 4 Gb RAM, partitioned the new drive and copied the /root and > /home partitions from the old drive to the new with DD. (Running Mint 16) > Disconnected the old HD and no joy. I found that this was due to the > old drive root being sda3 and the new one sda1 thus confusing Grub. > Sorted that and decided to apply Mr Meowski's infallible method of > upgrading as I find Mint 17 has appeared. This worked but with one or > two funnies which I haven't the details of now. But I got it working and > it ran for a couple of hours OK but coming back to it I found a blank > screen and the HD running constantly. After waiting an hour I reset and > the system was screwed, no boot, can't find an operating system, a day > of trying this and that using a laptop to get info off the net. I > disconnected the new HD and reconnected the old HD and lo and behold, > that was borked too. I eventually found that there was a hardware fault, > processor problem I think, which had screwed the root somehow. Give up > time. > > 2. I have another computer, no working HD, so I fitted the new drive to > that. I didn't have a copy of the Mint 17 iso so I installed Mint 16 > from a cd to sda1, sda2 being the original home directory. Everything > worked so I then went to upgrade to Mint 17 using the Mr Meowski method. > But the sources list would not work, There were in fact no entries in > /etc/apt/sources.list, only a line saying > # deb cdrom:[Linux Mint 16 _qiana_ - Release i386 20131128]/ trusty > contrib main non-free which I assume is from the cd install. > So, I went into synaptic and updated the repositories from petra to > qiana and saucy to trusty, came out of synaptic and ran apt-get > dist-upgrade, which it did. So, I now had a fully working installation > of Mint 17 which I proceeded to embellish with all the useful cruft > which I can't live without. Worked OK except that I can't seem to > install a working copy of Vbox. > I think it is down to my sources.list (which now has a line I put in deb > http://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/debian qiana contrib) but > doesn't work from that either. I believe that the problem is the > sources this damned installation is working from. Where are they? I've > had a hunt but can't find them. Any suggestions please. > > George > Your first problem could have been completely avoided by using /dev/disk/by-uuid style paths in fstab rather than the old fashioned /dev/sdX notation - this is highly recommended in modern distros and I thought it was actually the default for most of them by now, especially Ubuntu. I'd be surprised if it couldn't have been fixed by booting any, but preferably a Mint/Debian/Ubuntu, live Linux CD or USB on the borked system, chrooting into the on-disk install and fixing it from there. "sudo grub-install /dev/sda" is usually enough to do it once you've got all your filesystems mounted correctly (including bind mounts). No idea what happened the second time around to bork your system - from sources.list only having that one entry beginning "# deb cdrom..." I'd be tempted to guess you were still actually running in the live environment, although that doesn't seem too likely. Here is a full sources.list from my current Mint 17 VM if you want to compare: ghost@mint:~$ cat /etc/apt/sources.list deb http://packages.linuxmint.com/ qiana main upstream import backport romeo deb-src http://packages.linuxmint.com/ qiana main upstream import backport romeo #Added by software-properties deb http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ trusty main restricted universe multiverse deb http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ trusty-updates main restricted universe multiverse deb http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ trusty-security main restricted universe multiverse deb http://archive.canonical.com/ubuntu/ trusty partner For VirtualBox, "qiana" isn't recognised as a valid distro version as Oracle use the Ubuntu family ones instead - try this: deb http://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/debian trusty contrib Don't forget to import their key, etc. Did you remember to do a memtest on your new RAM? I never used to bother, but after getting bitten repeatedly by shoddy quality memory I know memtest all my new RAM as a matter of principle. I'd SMART check your 'new' drive as well, always worth checking to make sure they haven't cheekily shipped you a refurb (never seen this in person, but there are many, many horror stories on the internet). Cheers -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/listfaq