Stuck at the login screen (Jonas Norlander)

gene heskett gheskett at wdtv.com
Wed Jan 12 18:21:08 UTC 2011


On Wednesday, January 12, 2011 01:09:19 pm Brian Wootton did opine:

> On 12/01/11 11:36, kubuntu-users-request at lists.ubuntu.com wrote:
> > On Tuesday, January 11, 2011, Brian Wootton wrote:
> >> >  got the grub prompt eventually but it would only allow me to type
> >> >  a single character before giving the prompt again.
> >> >  So bye bye Lucid, Maverick here I come
> > 
> > I'm thinking you have a hardware problem......
> 
> You were so right, it was either a dud SATA II port on the motherboard
> or a badly
> routed data cable, this is all I fiddled with in the tower and it
> appeared to fix the
> problem - Maverick install failed at the partitioning stage until I had
> mucked about
> with the hard drive cabling. I've heard reports in the past about
> mis-matching on
> the SATA II data link cable - signal reflections causing errors.
> Anyway, the upgrade from Lucid to Maverick has been pretty painless - so
> far - as
> you can see.
> brian

One other thing I am compelled to comment on.  I have good color vision, 
and that "hot" red dye used in 99.9% of all sata cables has a 40 some year 
history with me, of causing premature cable failures.  The copper wire 
within it will slowly oxidize or whatever, becoming black, brittle, 
breakable and cannot be cleaned up enough to make a good solder joint.  
Typically in not more than 5 years and often sooner.  I am slowly 
collecting bad sata cables here from that effect myself, and actively 
looking for some place on the net selling replacement cables that don't 
have this faint tinge of magenta red colored jacket.  FWIW, old time 
American cable makers that no longer exist, used a different dye, a darker 
red, that doesn't cause this time related copper failure.

-- 
Cheers, Gene
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
 soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
Remember though that
THERE IS NO GENERAL RULE FOR CONVERTING A LIST INTO A SCALAR.
             -- Larry Wall in the perl man page




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