Problems booting into Kubuntu

[gigabz666]

I've asked for help in a few Kubuntu forums but got absolutely nothing back, not even hints or links to somewhere. I was hoping I would get a little more help in here.

I have a desktop PC with two NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GTX's in SLi, 2x250GB drives in RAID 0 with Windows Vista on it and 1x500GB drive with Kubuntu 7.10.

The current problem is simply that I can't boot normally into Kubuntu. I select the latest kernel from GRUB, and then when I'm supposed to get the screen with Kubuntu and a loading bar, I get absolutely nothing. I've tried Ctrl-Alt-F1 to get to the command line but nothing. It just seems to freeze.

However, if I boot in using the safe mode, I end up at a command line prompt as root after several lines of things which go by too fast for me to read. If I then type in "telinit 3" I get to a login screen and I can then using Kubuntu normally.

So I can use Linux, but instead of booting straight away, I have to use the safe mode. It's just a frustrating niggle and I was hoping to get some help in tracking down the problem.

I must be one of the few people to have more trouble with NVIDIA cards compared to ATI.

[Kano]

As far as I know has *ubuntu no support for dmraid in the installer. The Kanotix installer has, best is to use grub4dos inside Win and chainload to a Kanotix install with grub installed into partition. Kanotix Thorhammer has even RAID 5 support via dmraid - something that you can only dream for when you want to use U because they don't add the needed kernel patch + updated dmraid.

Hint: Don't try gparted on dmraid (/dev/mapper/...) that will not work.

[gigabz666]

As far as I know has *ubuntu no support for dmraid in the installer. The Kanotix installer has, best is to use grub4dos inside Win and chainload to a Kanotix install with grub installed into partition. Kanotix Thorhammer has even RAID 5 support via dmraid - something that you can only dream for when you want to use U because they don't add the needed kernel patch + updated dmraid.

Hint: Don't try gparted on dmraid (/dev/mapper/...) that will not work.

Hmm, doesn't sound particularly simple. I've been using Linux for little over a year now and I've not always had the best of times with many of the installations.

Am I being naive in thinking that future builds of *Ubuntu will implement dmraid for the installer? And also I'm being way off in thinking the problem is due to the graphics card? I don't really understand why it works in the safe mode but not in the normal mode. Again I'm still learning so I don't fully understand the ins and outs.

I'm running Linux off a single hard drive, it doesn't have to do anything with the Windows RAID drive, or does Linux see it and "freak out"?

I guess after running a couple of different distros, I've found myself comfortable with Kubuntu and I'm a little hesitant to move really. As I said, it's a frustration, but it runs. And having it run is the most important point.

I hope you can help me a little more with some of those questions but if not, I appreciate the response a lot. Thanks!

EDIT: Also, maybe this should be moved to another section if this is not a graphics card problem.

[Kano]

Well you can install kubuntu on a seperate drive, just install dmraid later to get access to the win drive via /dev/mapper/xxx, do not try to access it via the devices shown by

dmraid -r

[ottothebusdriver]

Hi
I also have an SLI config and have found that when my monitor is plugged into the primary graphics card, I can see the CD boot menu, but after that the screen goes blank and never comes back.
When I plug the monitor into the secondary graphics card, the screen is blank for ages (I assume waiting for the cd boot menu to time out) until the card resets twice in then the desktop appears like nothing was wrong.
I have found this with both Ubuntu and Kubuntu (Gutsy).
I have 3 hard drives in my setup which I want to use as RAID 5. My motherboard has an nvidia chipset. Didn't realise that it wasn't hardware RAID until I tried installing linux. A bit new to this as you can tell. But I did find that once you get a desktop from a live cd it is easy to install dmraid, but if you want to use RAID 5, the kernel will need recompiling. I think you might be ok for raid 1 or 0, but haven't tried.
The other thing I have found which may help is that Fedora 8 (according to the nvidia website) is the only current distribution to come with dmraid installed. Fedora 8 also only used the primary graphics card.

Otto

[Kano]

As the dmraid patch is from Red Hat, maybe Fedora can be used too if you don't like Kanotix, but no got for pure Ubuntu.

[gigabz666]

Hi
I also have an SLI config and have found that when my monitor is plugged into the primary graphics card, I can see the CD boot menu, but after that the screen goes blank and never comes back.
When I plug the monitor into the secondary graphics card, the screen is blank for ages (I assume waiting for the cd boot menu to time out) until the card resets twice in then the desktop appears like nothing was wrong.
I have found this with both Ubuntu and Kubuntu (Gutsy).
I have 3 hard drives in my setup which I want to use as RAID 5. My motherboard has an nvidia chipset. Didn't realise that it wasn't hardware RAID until I tried installing linux. A bit new to this as you can tell. But I did find that once you get a desktop from a live cd it is easy to install dmraid, but if you want to use RAID 5, the kernel will need recompiling. I think you might be ok for raid 1 or 0, but haven't tried.
The other thing I have found which may help is that Fedora 8 (according to the nvidia website) is the only current distribution to come with dmraid installed. Fedora 8 also only used the primary graphics card.

Otto

Ok great. So the blank screen is a graphics card in SLI problem.

The RAID thing I'm not fussed about, since that is only holding the Windows partition. The other drive, just normal SATA, no RAID whatsoever holds Linux, so I didn't understand how Linux wouldn't boot properly considering it doesn't have to deal with RAID (apart from if I want to access the Windows Partition, which would be nice but isn't incredibly important).

So I guess to solve the problem of (seemingly) not being able to boot past GRUB would be to use the monitor with the secondary card, or use Fedora.