MintBox Pro Installation Update Issues <SOLVED>

[grey_matter_lost11]

I brought a MintBox quite a while ago, which came pre-installed with Linux Mint 13.
mintBox Pro
• 1.65 GHz AMD G-T56N dual core CPU with 18W TDP
• Radeon HD 6320 graphics
• 8GB of RAM
• 250GB hard drive
• ribbed metal case (7.5″ x 6.3″ x 1.6″)

It stopped booting a little while ago (I can’t remember the error messages) and I thought that it might be the hard drive, because it was quite old and I could boot into a live USB environment.

So I tried replacing the hard drive with a 1TB SSD and installing Linux Mint 19 (and 20 when that didn’t work) but, although it looked to be successfully installed, it would not boot (It seems to get stuck booting and looks like it is trying to utilise the onboard LAN in an effort to find a way to boot), but would still boot into a live environment, via USB.

I did check if the grub file was there and as it was newly installed I presumed it should be working.

Out of curiosity I decided that I would look at the original hard disk drive and I think that it might be ok as I was able to mount it in another machine and I also ran the following tests and got no errors.

Original hard drive consists of two partitions

a) 228G – Linux Mint 13 – no fsck errors – mountable and listable - Passed short smartctl test
b) 4.9G – Swap partition – no fsck errors – not mountable as SWAP – Passed short smartctl test

I did try a vmdk file to see if I could boot from the hard drive, which I couldn’t do. However I am unsure whether that is a problem with configuration or a problem with the hard drive/files.

I have 2 questions related to this:

1) Is there anything apparent from the information given that would suggest what the problem(s) are?
2) Is there anything else I can do in order to troubleshoot the issue(s)?

Any help is appreciated.

[rossdv8]

Just answering this because it is similar to a problem I used to see as a tech.

I don;t use a Mint Box, so these are all simply 'guesses' by a retired old tech. Things I would probably look at first if this was on my bench.
Based on the machine still booting into a live USB environment
Based on the machine looking "like it is trying to utilise the onboard LAN in an effort to find a way to boot"

Have you checked the Startup or Boot tab in BIOS for the selected Boot Priority?
It is unlikely, but somehow LAN might be enabled as the first Boot device.
It is also possible that your Hard Drive is NOT enabled, or is below LAN on the Boot Priority list

Normally you should have USB device as Priority 1
Hard drive as Priority 2
LAN and any other device you are not likely to boot from DISABLED (or at least moved to the bottom of the list.
It is some years since I needed to play around in BIOS to the extent that I had to actually 'read the instructions' for the different brands.

From memory, I could usually highlight a drive option and use something like the + and - keys on my keyboard to move the highlighted option up or down the list.

Pressing Enter, (again from my memory - so I might be wrong) gave me the option to Disable or Enable some items).

This may not solve your problem - but it might be a place to start looking D)

If you find the problem in there - boot to your USB drive asnd try reinstalling and reboot at the end of the process. See if it worked.
If it did - great.
If it didn't - you might have to wait for an answer from someone who has a Mint Box Pro..

[grey_matter_lost11]

Hi

Thanks for providing feedback.

I've looked at the Boot Priority and have disabled everything (including the LAN) apart from USB and HDD and placed them in the order suggested but it still doesn't boot (it doesn't look for LAN any more though). Tried re-installing as well but to no avail.

I'll try some more tinkering with the BIOS settings but I'm not sure that will fix the issue.

[rossdv8]

Me either, but at least you found the 'looking for LAN' thing D)

There have only been about 70 views so far. I'm sure someone else will think of something.
In the mean time, and for your info, I have an old Gigabyte Brix and a Lenovo m93p Tiny, both not a lot different from the Mint Box idea and both running Mint and BOTH can boot from any HDD or SDD attached internally and also any attached externally (old boot drives with /boot and /home partitions on them).

Since my GRUB finds any bootable drive connected, including the external ones, I find this problem unusual.
The one thing I can thin of is that somehow you might have your partitioning of the new drive screwed up.
If nobody gets back to you, I'll try to go through that with you after I get back from hospital.

If you are not too bored, you might like to do an install again and choose something like:

/ 40 GiB
/Home The rest of the hard disk

Then check again that when it says something like 'Write Master Boot Record to' it goes to sda

[grey_matter_lost11]

Thanks, I'm not getting too bored yet but I can't really work on it until weekends.

With regards to the partitioning I did already have a separate root and home partition but am will try again and am willing to try other suggestions as well.

[grey_matter_lost11]

Sorry it has taken me a while to get back to this but I have managed to resolve this, although not fully understand how/why this has occurred.

Just to recap I was trying to install either Linux Cinnamon 19.3 or Linux Cinnamon 20, from a USB drive with Ventoy installed on.

With regards to the BIOS I found the following settings worked:

UEFI: Off
Legacy: On
Priority: Legacy

or

UEFI: On
Legacy: On
Priority: Legacy

The first problem that I discovered was that trying to use the partition table format "gpt" rather than "msdos" did not work. I believe theoretically it should but I think it is advised against, probably for situations like these!

My first success occurred when I chose an "msdos" partition table (all attempts from here on use the "msdos" partition table) and used a simple "/" and "swap" partition setup. I was able to install Linux Cinnamon 19.3 and was then subsequently able to install Linux Cinnamon 20 over that.

However when I tried a more complicated partition set up and tried to install Linux Cinnamon 20 directly, this did not work. I then tried to install Linux Cinnamon 20 on a simple "/" and "swap" partition set up but this did not work. I then reverted to replicating the success I had in the paragraph above, to make sure it was still working (which it did). I then tried a complicated partition set up with Linux Cinnamon 19.3 and was able to successfully install it. From there I was able to install Linux Cinnamon 20 over that.

I have a feeling that it is probably not necessary to install Linux Mint 19.3 before being able to install Linux Cinnamon 20 but it was the only way that I successfully could and to be quite honest I had installation fatigue so didn't really want to keep installing in order to determine where/what the issue was!

I had tried, as much as possible, to keep processes the same, so it would be evident if a change had an impact. I have a feeling that the issue might lie somewhere in how the swap was partitioned/configured because that was where the most amount of variability was.

Thanks for all the help.