Ubuntu mate can't handle a new drive existing?

Support & Help Requests
#1

I just installed ubuntu MATE 18.04.1 from dvd.

During the install, I disconnected my windows 10 drive so that there’s no possible way it could do anything to it.

The install went fine, the only thing I installed after that was chrome from the boutique.

I shut down, plugged the windows drive back in, booted up, went into bios and moved the windows 10 drive above the mate drive. Windows boots fine, whew.

So then I restarted, went into bios and moved the ubuntu drive back up. (windows drive still connected but below the ubuntu drive).

I got a prompt:

(initramfs):

What the hell is that? And why?

I typed “exit”.

Kernel panic.

And if you’re wondering- windows can’t mount the mate drive so it’s not like windows could’ve even touched it.

Is this what I should expect from ubuntu mate? It freaks out if I connect a “new” drive?

Side question- I noticed when mate actually worked that it doesn’t partition /home. It just puts it in /. Is that what normal ubuntu does? Or is that a mate thing?

Thanks,

#2

Possibly, when you installed UM the disk drive was /dev/sda and it wrote grub in /dev/sda.

Plugged in Win drive. Now, the UM disk could be seen as /dev/sdb hence initramfs and panic.

Question: if you connect the UM disk only, does it boot properly without panic?

For your second question, 18.04 installs everything under “/” If you’d like a separate partition “/home” you can choose the “something else” option in the partitioning section when you’re installing and make your own partitions.

HTH

#3

Good idea but no- I just disconnected the windows drive and rebooted and I still get the (initramfs): prompt.

Doesn’t make sense…

#4

At the (initramfs) prompt type, fsck -fy /dev/sda1 (-f is force -y is yes) it is possible that your UM disk needs to be filechecked (bad blocks or something). When done, type exit and it should reboot UM normally.

#5

Ok so here’s what I did- I didn’t realize you meant to disconnect the windows drive again?

Ok so what I did (with the windows drive connected) is:

fsck -fy /dev/sda1

And I got:

fsck from util-linux 2.31.1

But while I was in there I figured I try it on sdb1 and I got an endless stream of:

inode [x] seems to contain garbage clear? Yes

(x being the inode index)

Yea so obviously the -y is why I got all the Yes’s

So is the drive fundamentally broken? I had run smartctl on it (well in windows 10 it was a visual interface but same thing). I ran in overnight and my PC crashed entirely but I think that was for unrelated reasons and it was at 91% when it stopped.

Do you think it’s the drive? I mean, remember- UM did boot and run just fine the first time… And all I did was install chrome, so there’s not a lot of changing anything there.

#6

I would keep running fsck on /dev/sdb1 until it is clean … if that does not happen, the drive has some errors that cannot be fixed, then I’d advise to use another drive. Normally, you can run smartctl -a /dev/sdb and read about the health of the drive.