Asus T100TA - Unable to partition

[Digicomp]

I have an Asus T100TA which formerly ran Win 8.1. The Win 8.1 OS failed, which I view as absolutely no loss. As part of the diagnostic process, tried booting Mint 20 Live via USB. The good news: Mint Live booted absolutely flawlessly after I made a minor tweak to the USB. I am very impressed.

However when I try to install, the Mint installer throws I/O errors from the eMMC mmcblk2 (which is the main 29GB device.) I ran a live version of GParted, and it also refuses to partition the mmcblk2.

I suspect that the eMMC has gone bad. Indeed a test from the command line produces numerous i/o errors. But the system also returns "Direct firmware load... failed with error 2." Might the eMMC still be healthy, but lacking proper firmware? Or is the missing firmware merely a symptom of a failed eMMc?

My Asus has a 500GB hard disk under the removable keyboard. I briefly tried setting that up as the boot disk to no avail. Any thoughts would be appreciated including "Sell it for parts." Thanks!

[Pierre]

Hi Digicomp ,
welcome to our forum.


on that LM20 live media - - your usb stick,
- Menu - Accessories - Disks
grab an screen_shot of each of the drive(s) that it can find,
and copy all of those screen_shot(s) back here, on your reply.
so that we can tell which drives, that are still available in your Asus T100TA machine.

[Digicomp]

Thank you Pierre. Screen shots attached with two more coming. Also note fdisk output-

mint@mint:~$ sudo fdisk -l
Disk /dev/loop0: 1.75 GiB, 1863593984 bytes, 3639832 sectors
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes


Disk /dev/mmcblk2: 29.13 GiB, 31272730624 bytes, 61079552 sectors
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disklabel type: gpt
Disk identifier: 0281903F-6A22-4923-90E6-28635545AF44


Disk /dev/sdb: 465.78 GiB, 500107862016 bytes, 976773168 sectors
Disk model: 545050A7E680
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disklabel type: dos
Disk identifier: 0x23f4e51e

Device Boot Start End Sectors Size Id Type
/dev/sdb1 2048 976773119 976771072 465.8G 83 Linux


Disk /dev/sdc: 7.22 GiB, 7747397632 bytes, 15131636 sectors
Disk model: DataTraveler 2.0
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disklabel type: dos
Disk identifier: 0xab4700fa

Device Boot Start End Sectors Size Id Type
/dev/sdc1 * 2048 15130623 15128576 7.2G c W95 FAT32 (LBA)


Disk /dev/sda: 7.4 GiB, 7553777664 bytes, 14753472 sectors
Disk model: USB DISK 2.0
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disklabel type: gpt
Disk identifier: DB5371CF-37EE-4485-A83E-A1637420B9AE

Device Start End Sectors Size Type
/dev/sda1 2048 14751743 14749696 7G Windows recovery environment
mi

[Digicomp]

Remaining screen grabs of Disks.

I omitted the LM live USB.

[Digicomp]

Progress: The T100TA is now booting to the desktop but is freezing randomly.

Here is what I did to make it boot.

1. I used GParted to delete the existing partitions in the 500GB drive (inside keyboard.) The drive is sdb1.

2. Created new partitions using the instructions here: https://winaero.com/how-to-partition-yo ... inux-mint/

3. I also had to add an EFI petition to sdb1, which I made 11 MB.

3. Closed GParted and ran the LM Installer using the "something else" option. I directed the installer to use sdb1 as the boot device.

4. The installer then installed LM, but the machine was painfully slow and crashed a couple of times. I tried to update using the Software Mgr, but it kept crashing.

5. Rebooted and updated using Terminal, sudo apt update then sudo apt upgrade. This worked, but took a while.

6. Rebooted and everything worked - but slowly. The machine only has a 1.33 gig processor and 2 gig of RAM.

7. The machine is now freezing at random, which it did not do on the live USB.

[AndyMH]

3. I also had to add an EFI petition to sdb1, which I made 11 MB.

11MB is a tad on the small side for your EFI partition, I normally make mine 100MB.

I directed the installer to use sdb1 as the boot device.

At the bottom of the screen after selecting 'something else' is where you select where the bootloader goes. You select the device, e.g. sdb, not a partition.

[mikeflan]

The machine only has a 1.33 gig processor and 2 gig of RAM.

A weak computer with eMMC drives. I didn't know that was possible.
Do you want to try the Xfce OS? Sure would be nice to get LM on an SSD.

[Digicomp]

Made a typo. The EFI partition is 11 GB. not MB. I have 500 GB to use and most is empty.

Update: The random freezes stopped when I turned off all the various Effects in the main menu. LM is now running well. Chromium runs smoothly; Firefox is slower. I might try a lighter distro next, but have had good luck using LM on other weak hardware.

[AndyMH]

Made a typo. The EFI partition is 11 GB. not MB. I have 500 GB to use and most is empty.

Then that is definitely wrong. All that lives in the EFI partition are the bootloader files, hence 100MB is big enough. Or you confusing an EFI partition with something else?

[Digicomp]

Re: EFI. At some point I will resize things. For testing purposes, I set up very random partition sizes. Never expected LM to work on this formerly dead computer.

I switched from Cinnamon to Mate and the system is snappier. Left it running overnight with no glitches.

[Pierre]

that's making some progress on the SDB drive,
but all that is needed is :
- efi boot = 100Mb
- root / = 30GB
- home = rest of drive
- data = split 50/50 with /home if both are used.

- some folks will use less partition - - combined root & home, for example.
- some folks will like some extra partitions, to break out other system folders
( often UN-necessary, but some folks like that arrangement )

then you would use the "something else " option in the LinuxMint Installer,
to select each partition, in turn, mark it as it's interned purpose,
then click on Next, to continue with the actual Installation.

The machine only has a 1.33 gig processor and 2 gig of RAM, and an 32Gb eMMC hdd

that's exactly what my Lenovo 100s is .. win-10, too.

[AndyMH]

The only change I would make to Pierre's suggestion - if you can afford the space, create a 60GB ext4 partition to use for timeshift snapshots (the best solution for timeshift is to store snapshots on another drive). If you use the defaults in timeshift (saves to /timeshift), it will quickly fill up your / partition = no boot.

Other things to note - always a good idea to add labels to partitions when you create them (doesn't matter with / and /home partitions). Then when linux mounts them it will mount them using the label, e.g. at /media/you/mylabel. If you don't use a label it uses the UUID = not user friendly.

If you use gparted to create any ext4 data partitions they are owned by root, so read-only to you. Easy to fix, in a terminal:

Code: Select all

sudo chown -R $USER:$USER /media/you/mylabel

change the mount point to wherever it mounts.

You don't have this problem if you create ext4 partitions with disks.

[Digicomp]

Hello All- thanks for the advice. But now something strange has happened. My eMMC drive is suddenly working again, at least to some extent. I can now see an 8.3 gig drive on my desktop and it is accessible.This represents Partition 1 of the eMMC. I just attempted to format Partition 2 to FAT 32, but it threw an error. I have not tried anything else yet. But Partition 1 is clearly working.

I only made two changes yesterday: switched from Cinnamon to Mate, and installed the latest LM update. Perhaps a firmware fix was included in the update? Any suggestions to further restore the eMMC?

Thanks!

[Digicomp]

Hello All- thanks for the advice. But now something strange has happened. My eMMC drive is suddenly working again, at least to some extent. I can now see an 8.3 gig drive on my desktop and it is accessible.This represents Partition 1 of the eMMC. I just attempted to format Partition 2 to FAT 32, but it threw an error. I have not tried anything else yet. But Partition 1 is clearly working.

I only made two changes yesterday: switched from Cinnamon to Mate, and installed the latest LM update. Perhaps a firmware fix was included in the update? Any suggestions to further restore the eMMC?

Thanks!

[AndyMH]

No specific advice, but cinnamon is probably a bit too heavy for what you've got, probably better off with mate or xfce as they are a little less resource hungry.

[Digicomp]

Well, the eMMC in my T100TA turned out to be half alive, but not alive enough for an install. The installer kept throwing error messages. So I reinstalled LM Mate on the 500GB HDD (located in the machine's keyboard) and repartitioned the HDD during the install. The machine is now running well. Power consumption seems higher than Win 8.1, but the 7-yr old battery is still lasting a few hours. Many thanks to everyone who commented.