(Have a seat, it's going to be a long one...)
Late last week, I ran into a problem with my Ubuntu Studio 18.04 installation, where on booting up, it would run into an error where a USB device would not enumerate, or something to that effect, and the error kept just repeating itself ad nauseum. I just couldn't get past that.
One thing that really bugged me was that since I was using the Brave browser, whose sync function for synchronizing bookmarks and other settings between different devices was not working too well (or, at least, maybe I didn't use it right, when I did), I had given up using said sync function. This means that I had no backup of my bookmarks anywhere, nor did I have a backup of the data from one extension I used, umm.., extensively, namely, Tabs Outliner, which manages browser tabs and keeps them in an outline form, and allows you to close tabs while keeping tabs on them (no pun intended... I think...), so as to allow you to reopen the tabs later. The reason for that is that when using the extension in the Chrome browser, the fact you are signed in allows you to save your outline directly to your Google drive. But since Brave is based on Chromium, but does not sign in to Google services, the extension does not save to your google drive. (I only this week figured out a way to get around that limitation and crudely backup the outline... but that was too late for my 18.04 installation.)
So I decided to install Ubuntu Studio 20.04. Remembering a previous thread here, I installed it concurrently to 18.04, on a separate partition (instead of trying to upgrade my 18.04 installation), so as to not lose anything (settings ans such) from my 18.04 installation, and perhaps be able to revive it later.
At first, I was encouraged that while I did get the same error message about the USB device not enumerating, it didn't repeat the error message in a loop, but kept going with the boot process after displaying the error. My enthusiasm was short-lived, however...
As it turned out, after booting into Ubuntu Studio 20.04 (which is essentially Xubuntu with multimedia creation software pre-installed and configured to work well together), I could only run it for a few minutes before it would freeze! The mouse would move, but no clicks or keyboard key presses would register!
While trying to figure out a solution (using my Win10 tablet - I thoroughly dislike Win10, and still plan to eventually dual-boot the machine, but I haven't had the time yet.), the Windows 7 partition started bugging out on my main machine, as well! (In my dual boot setup on my main machine, I keep Windows 7 and my various Linux partitions on separate hard drives) As it is, when trying to boot into Windows 7, it kept going into file system check (chkdsk), but once it was completed, would not finish booting into Windows.
GAH!!!
Eventually, I did manage to find out that the problem with Ubuntu Studio 20.04 freezing was due to the Xfce screensaver. Removing said scrensaver, and replacing it with an independent screensaver (in this case, xscreensaver, which is not the same as xfce-screensaver) solved the freezing problem. Having done that, I installed the NVIDIA drivers for my card, and copied over the xorg.conf file from my 18.04 installation, giving me access to all three monitors, in the proper configuration.
Yay! Progress!
Don't worry, it only gets worse from here...
At one point, and I forget what I did which led to that, my Ubuntu Studio 20.04 installation bugged out (and this, before I even had a chance to try to fix the problem with the 18.04 ), giving me an error that something was trying to write outside of hard drive (hd0)... and not going any further after that.
I tried installing a new Linux distro in the vacant partition I still had on the PC, in order to try to fix things from the inside, so to speak, at a faster rate of operation than if I was running a live-CD distro from a USB key. I tried running Sparky Linux, which seemed interesting to me, as it was based on Debian, but had options to install much of the multimedia creation software I am used to seeing on my system all at once. This would allow me to continue with the multimedia creation software, while moving away from the Ubuntu architecture (from what I've read, I'm not fond of Snaps or Flatpacks, and Ubuntu seems to be moving headlong into that direction...). But I soon ran into problems: this distro did not have proper drivers for my old NVIDIA Geforce GT 610 graphics card (hint: the card is so old, that the current NVIDIA drivers don't support it anymore...) I did try to install an older version of the drivers (it did have legacy drivers options, for older cards), but it didn't work properly. Long story short (too late, I know...), it crapped out the installation. That Linux distro installation was no longer usable...
Forgetting the newly installed and newly borked distro, I went back to trying to fix the Ubuntu Studio 20.04 booting problem. So I tried a program called "Boot-Repair", but it didn't work at first as it wanted to have booted into UEFI mode in order to work. I found a way to set up a different USB key to boot into UEFI mode and try again. But for some reason, it didn't help.
I then tried to install another distro, replacing Sparky Linux on that one partition. For kicks, I tried installing Gecko Linux (a distro based on OpenSUSE linux, which takes care of much of the small details needed to make OpenSUSE more user-friendly, such as installing audio codecs and so on). Looking at things there, I did see some things that were different from Debian/Ubuntu based distros, such as how to change the location of the Home folder (for instance, there is no usermod command in OpenSUSE, apparently...) It didn't help that I purposely installed the Gnome DE version of the distro, as a learning experience, which made it harder for me to find things, of course... I did eventually find a place, from within YAST, where I could change the location of a user's Home folder. Unfortunately, even though I knew better, I did not create a new user to log into in order to change the location of my Home folder, but tried instead to change said location while still logged in as myself...
Of course, everything froze once that was done...
Every subsequent attempt to boot into Gecko Linux after that resulted in a text-based login. Not being familiar enough with the specifics of this distro, I decided to abandon it for now. I will return to it later, as a learning experience, but I don't have time right now.
I also spent a day or two (interspersed with periods of falling asleep at the computer) trying to go into recovery mode for Ubuntu Studio 20.04 and trying various things, in text mode, to try to fix Grub, to no avail. (I just can’t remember where that came by in the timeline.)
Throughout that process, I was able to ascertain that my data, which is kept on separate partitions, is safe and still accessible. (Finally, some good news...)
Another thing that became apparent, at some point during this process, was that the hard drive which hosts all the Linux partitions is no longer being seen as a boot drive in the BIOS! (Of course: I couldn’t expect a streak of good news, could I...
)So the last thing I've done was to install a new distro yet again: replacing Gecko Linux, which itself had replaced Sparky Linux, I have now installed Linux Mint Xfce edition. Being Ubuntu-based, I will be familiar with the underlying architecture/file system/etc. I tried installing the NVIDIA drivers, and there were drivers that said they were compatible with my cards (were they legacy drivers? I forget...) But it didn't work. I'm not going to waste time on that. Instead, I disabled the third screen, so as to not have any difficulty with the open source Nouveau driver for NVIDIA. At least, I have a usable computer, for the time being.
So now, I am spending a lot of time going through the 3TB USB 3 external drive, which contains, among other things, some old stuff from two computers ago, to determine what, if anything, can be dumped, to make room for my current data to be backed up onto the drive. Once I have trimmed the fat on that drive, I will be able to back up my current data, and wipe the original internal hard drive clean and start over with it.
My friend also sent me an ISO file for Windows 7, so I will try to repair the installation. But if that doesn't work, I may have to nuke that drive as well. And yes, I do know that if I install Windows AFTER installing Linux distros, the Windows boot loader will take over and completely ignore the Linux partitions. So either I will need to install Windows first, or I can deal with whatever Linux distros I want to install, which will recognize the existence of Windows (even if it is currently faulty) and add it to the Grub menu, and when I'm ready, I can physically disconnect the Linux hard drive before installing Windows. Once I reconnect the Linux drive, either things will work, or I will have to do Update Grub, which would take care of the rest of the boot process. This, even if I have to reinstall Windows completely, instead of just repairing the installation (I'll know when I get to that...)
After backing up my data, I’ll have to figure out what to backup to save as many of my settings and configuration as possible. I already know that keeping my /home/.config folder (from my 18.04 installation) will give me a lot of my settings to pick from later. I’m just not sure if I should keep all of my /home folder, or just parts of it.
Then I’ll move on to the nuking and repopulating...
)
