1 Topic by eccerr0r (edited by eccerr0r 2012-07-22 10:55:53)

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Topic: Strange (udev?) behavior of 0.13-1 livecd on HP Envy4

I tried to boot both the 0.9 and the 0.13-1 livecd's on my Envy4.  I'm using a Pioneer DVDRW drive attached via USB2.  I've also tried it on a USB flash memory and has the same issue.
All versions (usb or livecd) seem to fail with some weird behavior..

First off the minor one that's only relevant to the 0.13-1 stable livecd:  The graphics driver seems to set the backlight off, which gives the impression the machine is dead.  It seems like turning up the backlight make it look OK.

Second on 0.13-1 It seems the default boot ends up crashing after detecting USB.  It seems that going into "safe VGA" mode bypasses this.

Note: the 0.9 version does not have either of these problems.

OK, back to the main issue:  When gnuparted is finally loaded, a yellow triangle with a black exclamation mark is marked on all partitions - it seems it can't read them.  Viewing the dmesg log it seems to imply that the ntfs partitions weren't marked "clean" by Windows (Windows 7).  However this should have been the case,..

The next weird issue: when I open a terminal and cd /dev, I only see /dev/sda (and /dev/sdb, the accelerator card).  There are no sda1, sda2, sda3, sda4.  If I try to mknod them manually and access them (such as less -f them) they report the drives don't exist?  However it can read /dev/sda; it does properly identify the ntfs partitions on the disk and less -f /dev/sda works, at least I can inspect the contents of the boot sector.

Weird.

Also I was kind of confused by the default partition scheme on the machine: While I can't see /dev/sda1, /dev/sda2, etc. I can still fdisk /dev/sda.  This reports
/dev/sda1: a 199MiB partition NTFS.  Is this a Windows Boot launcher partition?
/dev/sda2: the 446GiB main partition NTFS.  Expected.
/dev/sda3: the 19.35GiB restore partition NTFS.  Expected.
/dev/sda4: a 108MiB Fat32 partition - What is this?

Unfortunately without the /dev/sda4 pointing to them I can't mount that partition to peek at it...  Not only this, I have to dump a partition to install Linux...  I hope the Fat32 partition I can jettison without any problems.

Any ideas on any of these anomalies?  This is a fairly new machine so I kind of expect a lot of issues...

(also, I've never liked how my touchpads worked in either version of gparted live media.  My Asus eeePC and IIRC my HP Pavillion laptop/netbooks, it seems like wherever I touch the pointer automatically moves to that absolute location of that screen.  Makes it very hard to click on buttons with the tap gesture.  It's even worse on the Envy because using the hardware buttons can also move the pointer as it's a fused device.  In windows this works fine despite the buttons fused with the touch surface...  In Gentoo Linux, the touchpads end up with the behavior I expect (meaning all gestures are pointer-relative).  Workaround is to use a real, external mouse...)

2 Reply by class413

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Re: Strange (udev?) behavior of 0.13-1 livecd on HP Envy4

laptop computers often contain proprietary hardware or proprietary firmware. In this case, using one of the alternate boot options instead of the fully auto, solves the graphics problem.
VGA 1024x768 is an option supported by most graphics cards.
Very often, adding some boot parameter fixes issues. The livecd maintainer is perhaps the most competent to advice on this.

Concerning the partitions:
Since long, computers with preinstalled mswindows operating systems come with a system restore partition, a test partition accessed from the bios for test purposes and perhaps a utility partition.
19.35GiB seems to be too big for a system restore partition.
As there is no extended partition, the way to investigate is to find which one of the existing partitions could be deleted (or perhaps be copied elsewhere and restored later as logical, if this is possible).
For this, it would be better to search in more specialized forums for this computer, to find the functionality of each one of the partitions.

*** It is highly recommended to backup any important files before doing resize/move operations. ***

3 Reply by gedakc

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Re: Strange (udev?) behavior of 0.13-1 livecd on HP Envy4

Further to class413's notes, can you boot other GNU/Linux distributions on the computer?  For example, Ubuntu, or Fedora?

If so, do these distributions recognize and create the partition entries /dev/sda1, /dev/sda2, etc.?

4 Reply by eccerr0r (edited by eccerr0r 2012-07-22 22:45:13)

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Re: Strange (udev?) behavior of 0.13-1 livecd on HP Envy4

Machine has Ivybridge CPU.  And it's fairly new hardware so I'm not surprised of these problems.  Since this thing has Win7 I'm not surprised the recovery partition is so large; it even required 5 4.7G DVDs to make the recovery disks...which does encompass the whole 19.35GB.  All else fails I'll have to go that route, but want to see if Gparted will work first smile

Experimenting with different boot disks:
Ubuntu 10.04 LTS - Graphics system does boot up but hangs during start up.
Gentoo x86 2012 floating release (Linux 3.1.10-gentoo-r1) from February - Could not find its own boot cdrom (ouch).  BUT in its initrd, its busybox/mdev FOUND the four partitions (as the expected block, major 8, minor 1 through 4) and I could mount the fat32 partition.  Found a few screenshots bmp's. Looks like there are some BIOS and BIOSUpdate directories as well as a SystemDiags directory.  This looks like the EFI boot partition! (?!) as it has EFI stuff in it.

EDIT: New data:
It looks like Gentoo x86-2012-7/10 finds thatt these disks/partitions are windows software RAID disks and also deletes the sda after it realizes them, and puts them in /dev/md123 ...
Odd...

EDIT: More data:
http://ubuntuguide.org/wiki/Multiple_OS … tion_sizes
It looks like I may need to get Windows to resize the partition first, but still not sure what to do about having only 4 partition entries and all are being used. I wonder if EFI cares about being on an extended partition...  Then again why isn't this GPT...

5 Reply by gedakc

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Re: Strange (udev?) behavior of 0.13-1 livecd on HP Envy4

Do you know if this is a Windows Dynamic Disk RAID, or a motherboard BIOS RAID?

If Windows Dynamic Disk RAID, then you will need Windows to handle the resizing.

Since fdisk returned partitions, we can assume that there are MSDOS partition table entries.  I wonder if there is a GUID Partition Table (GPT) in use?

Mac OS X uses a hybrid GPT/MBR partitioning scheme.  To check if your computer has a GPT you might try running

sudo gdisk -l

and if a GUID Partition Table is shown, then you are not limited to 4 partitions.

6 Reply by eccerr0r (edited by eccerr0r 2012-07-24 09:13:25)

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Re: Strange (udev?) behavior of 0.13-1 livecd on HP Envy4

No dice, it's MBR after all.  Gdisk does not detect a GPT.

The partition type for the NTFS partitions are HPFS/NTFS/exFAT (0x7)...

According to Windows Computer Management/Storage/Disk Management, the disk partitions are layout "Simple" and type "Basic"... very odd indeed.

Hmm...there's some indications about "isw_raid_member" (intel software raid?) but since this is a laptop, thous shouldn't be a RAID at all smile  No clue what HP/MSFT did here...  Or Intel for that matter...

EDIT: Ahh.  I think this may be Intel Smart Repsonse disk accelerator, but looking at the setup in Windows it should not cover the EFI partition nor the recovery partition; but it still blocked off access (or at least confuses linux) to the whole disk.

My guess to next steps: Disable Smart Response temporarily.  I also tried to see what the windows resizer would do, it would only drop the partition down to 220G or so... Blah, really need it down to like 100G...

7 Reply by class413

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Re: Strange (udev?) behavior of 0.13-1 livecd on HP Envy4

I also tried to see what the windows resizer would do, it would only drop the partition down to 220G or so... Blah, really need it down to like 100G...

Did you try it in 2 or 3 steps?

*** It is highly recommended to backup any important files before doing resize/move operations. ***

8 Reply by gedakc

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Re: Strange (udev?) behavior of 0.13-1 livecd on HP Envy4

If this is a motherboard BIOS raid, the device entries in GParted should be of the form /dev/mapper/isw_xxxxxxxx.  You might also see entries in the form /dev/dm-0.

9 Reply by eccerr0r (edited by eccerr0r 2012-07-30 05:09:26)

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Re: Strange (udev?) behavior of 0.13-1 livecd on HP Envy4

I think the underlying problem:

The 500GBHDD + 32GB SSD are FakeRaid0 (caching RAID0) by BIOS RAID.

To repartition the repartitioning software needs to understand Intel's SmartResponse caching system...
Since Linux itself does not deal with Intel Smart Response, I think the only thing to do is to reinstall the whole system...

*sigh*

Anyone else gotten into this situation and what do you do?  This cache actually improves performance of Win7 signficantly and since I paid for win7 I might well keep it and use it once in a while.  I wish that the same ISR "RAID0" system could be used under Linux directly...

10 Reply by gedakc

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Re: Strange (udev?) behavior of 0.13-1 livecd on HP Envy4

If there is support for ISR "RAID0" in Linux, it would most likely be in either the dmraid project, or the Linux Software RAID project.