26

Re: !! Invalid loop location (Gparted liveCD Guidance)

okay, let's try something better.
Gimme the output of the following command :

# dmesg | grep CD-ROM

if it is possible when you get the ash. Or do you have any other way to boot linux from within your pc ?

http://gparted.free.fr/screenshots/crash/CD-ROM.png

Larry
GParted-project Admin
Former GParted-LiveCD maintainer (2007)

27

Re: !! Invalid loop location (Gparted liveCD Guidance)

ok ill check...I get the ash after the error but if i can do it from n00buntu i could cut and paste the console... Ill have it in 4 hours...still at work thanks guys for all the help.

28

Re: !! Invalid loop location (Gparted liveCD Guidance)

Guil-T wrote:

Ill have it in 4 hours...

...Will be in my dreams ... since it is 8.11 pm here smile

Larry
GParted-project Admin
Former GParted-LiveCD maintainer (2007)

29

Re: !! Invalid loop location (Gparted liveCD Guidance)

Hi Larry hope your still up,
Here is what I get

guillaume@guillaume-desktop:~$ dmesg | grep CD-ROM
[    4.940972] scsi 4:0:0:0: CD-ROM            LITE-ON  DVDRW LH-18A1P   GL0F PQ: 0 ANSI: 5
[   13.797406] Uniform CD-ROM driver Revision: 3.20
[   13.797450] sr 4:0:0:0: Attached scsi CD-ROM sr0

Its weird cuz i dont have sr0 when i boot from the live cd ill go try it why the ash i get with the live cd
brb

30

Re: !! Invalid loop location (Gparted liveCD Guidance)

LITE-ON  DVDRW LH-18A1P
It is IDE model, as I found in the specifications.

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

31

Re: !! Invalid loop location (Gparted liveCD Guidance)

OK I just want to say I finally made it to boot...what i did is i built a bootable usb stick that doesnt boot wink (yes ive seteup my BIOS right), then i booted on the cd but passed cdroot=/dev/sdb1 (my usb stick) and booted and magic it worked... so im finally shrinking my ubuntu partition to give some more space to windows...

I just want to add I am more than willing to continue helping you guys if you want to improve the livecd and figure why my machine is so special... many thanx to larry who patiently worked with a noob like me... (hard to believe but i am a sw engineer...) I am more real time oriented...

32 (edited by ethanism 2007-06-19 02:22:34)

Re: !! Invalid loop location (Gparted liveCD Guidance)

I've been having the same issues that Guil-T describes, where it fails to load the gparted.dat file because it can't find a device to mount to access the CD-ROM I'm booting from.

Once it gets to the ash shell, I tried a few things:

# ls /dev/s*
sda
sda1
sg0
synth

# dmesg | grep CD-ROM
<returns no results>

/dev/sda is my primary SATA drive, and /dev/sda1 is the primary partition
/dev/sg0 and /dev/synth won't mount because they're not block devices

Also, grepping for other varieties of strings, like "DVD", "RAM", "ROM", etc.  also return nothing.

I noticed that Guil-T and I are using the *exact* same model of optical drive (LITE-ON DVDRW LH-18A1P), and when I tried the same CD on another machine with different hardware, it booted up fine, found the CD device, mounted the image, and launched X Windows and Gparted perfectly.

Let me know what I can do to help us diagnose and hopefully resolve this problem.

33

Re: !! Invalid loop location (Gparted liveCD Guidance)

Well, I know there is sometime problems with DVD drives, and especially  with DVD-RW

Could you please mail me your dmesg in a file ?
if you don't know how to do : # dmesg > dmesg.ethanism.
this should do the trick.
then put the file dmesg.ethanism on some usb stick or floppy or whatever you want, and mail me.
I will then peel it wink

Larry
GParted-project Admin
Former GParted-LiveCD maintainer (2007)

34

Re: !! Invalid loop location (Gparted liveCD Guidance)

BTW, you may try this too :
# dmesg | grep scsi

Larry
GParted-project Admin
Former GParted-LiveCD maintainer (2007)

35

Re: !! Invalid loop location (Gparted liveCD Guidance)

I'll try, but I'm pretty sure it's not a SCSI device.  It should either be detected as IDE or PATA, since it's plugged into the IDE bus on the 965RY board I'm using.

36

Re: !! Invalid loop location (Gparted liveCD Guidance)

ethanism wrote:

I'll try, but I'm pretty sure it's not a SCSI device.  It should either be detected as IDE or PATA, since it's plugged into the IDE bus on the 965RY board I'm using.

Don't worry : linux does see ide cdrom as scsi
Just try what i suggest,... please smile

Larry
GParted-project Admin
Former GParted-LiveCD maintainer (2007)

37

Re: !! Invalid loop location (Gparted liveCD Guidance)

in the worst case try what i did... wink

38

Re: !! Invalid loop location (Gparted liveCD Guidance)

I had same issue as all of you.

I have an intel DG965OT motherboard with 1gb ram and 320 gb hard drive with a core 2 duo 2.13.  I just wanted to re-size the HD as I made an image of another PC as I was upgrading PC.  After reading all the issues I switched my DVD-Rom drive to a CD-Rom external USB drive and had windows recognize it and ran the Gparted live cd again and  I was able to load into the program and re-size my drive.  My DVD-Rom is an ASUS Quiet track md#E616A3.

Looks like a bootable usb will do the trick, just make sure your bios says load usb boot device first or Boot usb enabled if you have an intel board.

39 (edited by ethanism 2007-06-19 23:12:47)

Re: !! Invalid loop location (Gparted liveCD Guidance)

Ok, I booted up to the CD and tried what you suggested:

# dmesg | grep scsi
scsi2 : ata_piix
scsi3 : ata_piix
scsi 2:0:0:0 Direct-Access ATA WDC WD1200JS-00M 02.0 PQ: 0 ANSI : 5
sd 2:0:0:0: Attached scsi disk sda
sd 2:0:0:0: Attached scsi generic sg0 type 0
scsi4: ata_piix
scsi5: ata_piix

Sorry it took me so long, I was out of the office for most of the day.

I was only testing out GParted on my workstation when I ran into this issue, so it's not critical that we get this working.  I just figured it would be a good chance to help out.

40

Re: !! Invalid loop location (Gparted liveCD Guidance)

weird, weird, weird ! :-/

Larry
GParted-project Admin
Former GParted-LiveCD maintainer (2007)

41

Re: !! Invalid loop location (Gparted liveCD Guidance)

I am using intel DG965RY with 2 sata HD sda and sdb and IDE DVD-RW Liteon LH-20A!P. The problem continues with version 0.3.4-7.
Any other solution from anyone. I can't use parted anymore :-(

42

Re: !! Invalid loop location (Gparted liveCD Guidance)

I gonna make some search googling it.
Feel free to do it by your self too wink

Larry
GParted-project Admin
Former GParted-LiveCD maintainer (2007)

43 (edited by be4truth 2007-08-14 04:22:15)

Re: !! Invalid loop location (Gparted liveCD Guidance)

I replaced the LiteON with a CD-ROM with the same results. CD-ROM as slave as well as as master. The drive is usually connected via /dev/scd0
It could be that kernels below 2.6.20 don't manange to handle the dual core system. Many people have boot problems using for example Ubuntu Dapper while Fesity runs out of the box.

Ok - got some more infos about the problem:

It looks that only the very new OS like madriva 2007, fedora7, suse latest and feisty have the drivers in their kernels to handle DG965RY with dual2core processors, sata drives and ide DVD.
I found one interesting post :

http://www.oakcourt.dyndns.org/~andrew/ … de|outline

"If you have an unsupported IDE chipset such as this, you may add 'all-generic-ide' to the command line of your 2.6.15 or later Linux kernel to force the generic IDE driver to claim all unknown IDE interfaces. ''This only works correctly if the PCI IDE generic driver is compiled into the kernel bzImage.'' If it is a module, as it is on debian-installer CD kernel images, this option will do nothing. Knoppix-derived distributions, for sure GRML and Knoppix 5.01, build this driver into the kernel and as such can boot PATA optical drives.
Boot failure

There is a BIOS bug on these boards that prevents MMCONFIG from being used to configure the PCI bus. If it is used the system will hang early in boot. Details and a patch are here. To fix this on kernels that do not blacklist MMCONFIG on this board, boot with:

pci=nommconf

This is not an issue on 2.6.18 and later.

The Fedora Core 6 installation DVD, at least the x86_64 edition, may require the 'irqpoll' option in addition to the 'pci=nommconf' option above. The failure mode if this is a problem is interrupt timeouts on SATA peripherals. This has happened on one system with a SATA hard disk. Thank you to Brent Stephens <brent at stephenscorp dot com> for this tip.
Kernel versions

No live CD distribution I tried to boot from had anything later than 2.6.16, except for Knoppix and GRML which had 2.6.17. "

This is probably the problem for installaing old linux distros and I have the feeling it is the problem why gparted doesn't boot properly.

The solution - pray and it will come ...
Pray harder and it might come sooner ...
Become a programmer and do something about it and it will be there tomorrow ...
I am not a programmer.
What comes next?
One can use the Fesity live DC to use some functions of gparted but not the full set.

more research:
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Core_2_Duo_Support

"Installer Freezes on Not Finding IDE CD/DVD-ROM Drive

I believe this is caused due to the Intel P965 chipset has no more integrated IDE channel, thus the motherboard usually has an additional chip onboard for an IDE channel. In the current Gigabyte (I got one of them) and ASUS (think they have it too) this is a JMicron JMB363, in Intel motherboards it's a Marvell 88SE6101 controller. Until very recently the kernel had a bug inside that made it unable to access the IDE/PATA channel. So If you have and IDE drive or HDD left you will not be able to use it.

I would guess most people have a SATA drive with such a new computer. The trick to it is then to avoid the PATA CDROM for installation (though the BIOS can boot off it). Utilising USB, you can do the following:

    *      Install Ubuntu from USB stick as per [WWW] https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Insta … omUSBStick
    *      Boot off the PATA CDROM and copy a KNOPPIX installation to USB stick. KNOPPIX will utilise kernel etc from the CDROM and then resume booting from USB stick.

Either of these methods has worked for me just fine. "

Have a look at this post:
http://www.sysresccd.org/forums/viewtop … =4409#4409

44

Re: !! Invalid loop location (Gparted liveCD Guidance)

I'm not a linux expert at all.
I had the same problem as described above preventing Gparted live cd from booting.
I  had entered the bios and at Drives-SATA Operation I changed it to "Combination" instead of "Normal".
When this setting is on you can use only 2 of the 4 sata ports.
I saved the settings and tried to boot and it worked! The live cd had booted!

45

Re: !! Invalid loop location (Gparted liveCD Guidance)

Sorry
I forgot to mention that the machine is Dell GX620 computer.

46

Re: !! Invalid loop location (Gparted liveCD Guidance)

Thank you for this information. smile

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

47

Re: !! Invalid loop location (Gparted liveCD Guidance)

One solution that sometimes works is to pass following kernel option at boot prompt:

pci=nomconf ide0=0x1018,0x1010

The problem with this trick is that it doesn't boot the sata drives as sate but as ide which leads sometimes to comfusion. But it might help to install an OS. One can later take this boot parameter out after upgrading to a newer kernel I guess.

48

Re: !! Invalid loop location (Gparted liveCD Guidance)

I tried version 0.3.4-8. Problem still persists.

49

Re: !! Invalid loop location (Gparted liveCD Guidance)

Give Parted Magic a try and see if it works any better. It's using linux-2.6.22 and GParted is using 2.6.21. The kernel guys could have a fix in this newer release. I looked at the Gentoo linuxrc that Larry was using and in no way is it probing for /dev/scd* of any kind. Parted Magic on the other hand does and I also probe for /dev/pcd* too.

Patrick Verner
www.partedmagic.com

50 (edited by be4truth 2007-09-23 10:11:18)

Re: !! Invalid loop location (Gparted liveCD Guidance)

Hi Patrick,
that does the trick. I have 2 sata drives and in Ubuntu Feisty they are mountted as /dev/sda and sdb. With parted magic /dev/sda gets mounted as /dev/hdc and /dev/sdb gets mounted as /dev/sda. The DVD-player must be /dev/sr0 I guess. It works but this 965RY board has a strange way to migrate from IDE to SATA. Does the 2.6.22 have this support build in by default? IF so I should look for this kernel when downloading LiveCDs I guess.
Thx for your help. After almost 3 months I have a functional partition tool.

be4truth