Ubuntu 18.04.1 device failure bug strikes

Septermber 30

There was this old fool trying to install the latest and greatest of the Linux releases on an old AMD 64-bit machine as a fresh install - and bingo, the feared 'user device failure' bug strikes!

Actually, it may have been an actual device that was wiped out by a 10 past nine thunderstorm two nights ago when I first attempted the installation:

At the first clap of thunder I raced to unplug the phone line to the Fritz!Box 7490 as usual, before taking out all the power connections to my soi-disant office. And that may have been my undoing...

Anyway, I began a new installation at around 8 a.m. today, and 10 hours later it is still ongoing. At least it hasn't crashed again - yet!

It had been the mouse that had been rendered inoperative before, and the system left crashed for good. Now there's hope...

Shall keep you posted...


October 1

It was a vain hope: the PC had been partitioned inviolably by MS when I started it a couple of days back, and MS kindly offered to update everything that needed updating... In effect, it snatched the main HD for itself, and formatted it and a second HD to NTFS! Bugger.

Nor could I do anything about it when I selected a drive to install Ubuntu on, so I blithely selected a 2 TB HD for my new O/S.

And was left wondering why the installation would NOT start - it was looking at the wrong HD to boot from...

Now a heretic thought occurred to me: I still have a legitimate copy of Windows 10 Ultimate, so why not install that, and make Ubuntu a dual-boot thing?

(Another option might be to take out each HD and format it separately in another PC?)

MTC

2clever/2...So I used a Windows 10 disk and advanced installation settings to erase ALL traces of Win-formatted HDs in the machine and proceeded, for good measure, to start installation of Kubuntu 18.04.1 LTS on the wretched PC...

It also threw up initial fatal errors such as device failure etc. but I persisted and the installation went smoothly until I had 36 p.c. done in under half an hour.

Then it told me it couldn't write to the nominated disk, perhaps I should check it for errors... Did that three times before I threw the towel.

Now off to do our weekly shopping.

More later.

October 6 - much later than expected but the damn switch to Telstra intervened - and I still haven't got the 'Net connected but rely on the good offices of Internode to keep me going regardless...

To cut a long story short: I have installed Kubuntu 18.01.04 LTS on my financial computer and it's running beautifully!

How did I do it? Well, in the end I just unplugged 4 HDs ('spinning rust') including a 2 TB HD that Windows had taken over, and instead plugged in a tiny 500 GB solid-state disk I had lying around, complete with its own little mSATA converter box and cable. Neat!

Highly recommended.

NB: the little Logitech hub that serves both the wireless keyboard and the wireless mouse fails intermittently, usually when I launch Firefox! Is this a fault with the browser or with the Logitech hub?

Any ideas, anyone?

19/10/18
Update: The tiny USB 3.0 to mSATA 500 GB box with USB connector probably failed intermittently because the old PC is limited to USB 2.1...

So today I plugged in a Kingston mSATA 500 GB drive that has twin connectors, one for USB 2 and one for USB 3.

Still no luck: Kubuntu doesn't see ANY drives at all (I had of course unplugged the 'spinning rust' and just connected the SSD).

Now experimenting with BIOS tricks LOL