Good morning everyone,
after installing a clean copy of Zorin OS 17 on an Intel Pentium D, I came across this strange problem: the first boot always fails, blocking at the Zorin message while the following one works correctly. If I try to restart or shut down it freezes again and then restarts on the next boot. Basically it alternates between failed and good boots. Can you help me understand and solve the problem?
The first place that comes to mind that I would check is the boot logs, and see if something reports as not OK. You can read it by running the following on a terminal window:
sudo cat /var/log/boot.log
If it's a laptop, try to remove the battery entirely and try again without it. Batteries are among the first components to fail so it's possible it's causing the problems, although it's strange that it happens with the same consistency.
You can also try to boot from an external live USB drive and see if that works. This would bypass the hard drive, and so it may be a sign that something is wrong there if you can boot normally via this method.
The PC is a desktop, not a notebook and, before installing the OS, I booted numerous times with the Live USB and never had any freezes. The problem only appeared after installing the OS on HDD. I'm not at home at the moment so I can't check the logs you indicated but I'll definitely do it tonight and paste here the result.
Here I am, I ran the indicated command (sudo cat /var/log/boot.log) and pasted the output. The first block (20:15) is the boot that crashed while the second (20:16) is the boot completed correctly. I don't notice any obvious errors but I have no experience analyzing this type of data so maybe I'm wrong.
Unfortunately I'm also not experienced reading this type of error logs but it's always good to check, as sometimes the error is spelled out clearly if you look closely. In this case however I'm not sure what could be the issue...
Hi,
I read it all and didn't find any errors, the bad log simply stops before completing the boot sequence.
I also checked with the journalctl -b and journalctl -1 -b commands and then compared them line by line. There too I have not identified anything that highlights what the problem could be, at least in my eyes. However, if it could help resolve the issue, I may post them both this evening.
The second log shows "recovery journal" at the very beginning which seems to indicate that the filesystem has recovered from a bad state. The fact that it continues to fail on the next boot suggests that something else is causing the issue, maybe during the shutdown process.
In addition to the suggestion from Aravisian above I would also run a filesystem check. This marked solution shows two ways of doing that (ZorinOS is based on Ubuntu so the steps are equivalent):
If after trying this the issue persists, I would consider re-installing ZorinOS, since you mention that this is already a fresh install and so (I assume) you don't yet have committed too much time into this system. Why would this have failed in the first place, I don't know, but the good old method of "turn it off and back on again" works far more often than it should in an ideal world
If you do go this route make sure to double check the ISO file for correctness as well, just in case.
Hi,
I honestly thought that the recovery journal status was normal on the second boot since, by freezing on the first boot, I am forced to turn it off forcibly.
Tonight I will try some of the suggestions you have given me and if I am not successful I will try to reinstall it on a new disk even if I am not convinced that this alternation of failed and successful boots can be caused by the disk.
PS: the ISO was checked during the installation phase and did not give any errors.
HI,
I tried setting the "nomodeset" parameter but nothing changed. I then tried to do a File System Check but I wasn't able to complete it as it always gave me the mounted partition error (even trying to run it live from the pendrive). So I decided to follow the last suggested route: a complete reinstallation. To also exclude any problems with the disk, I used a new one and finally everything works normally. I haven't yet managed to configure everything exactly as before but I'm sure that even with subsequent tuning the problem will be definitively resolved. I thank everyone for the support you have given me and, in case I manage (I hope not) to replicate the problem, I will write it here for information purposes.