reinstall 18.04

[Liam Proven]

On Sun, 30 Aug 2020 at 18:39, John R. Sowden <jsowden at americansentry.net> wrote:
>
> toshiba satelite laptop a135-s4527 graphics card-uk, hd 20% used brand
> model uk

OK. A bit old now, a Vista-era machine, but I used to have one of its
big brothers (a Satellite Pro A300) and it was a good solid machine
with a good keyboard.

The latest BIOS seems to be version 1.70 -- if you don't have that, it
might be worth a try.

https://support.dynabook.com/support/modelHome?freeText=1598555&osId=24

> xubuntu 18.04

That's a bit old now. I would probably suggest Xubuntu 20.04.

I have it running on a 2008 MacBook Pro. I can confirm that it works
fine on older hardware.

https://xubuntu.org/release/20-04/

>    WARNING: Failed to connect to lvmetad. Falling back to device scanning.
>    Volume group "xubuntu-vg" not found
>    Cannot process volume group xubuntu-vg
>    WARNING: Failed to connect to lvmetad. Falling back to device scanning.
>    Reading all physical volumes.  This may take a while...
>    Found volume group "xubuntu-vg" using metadata type lvm2
>    WARNING: Failed to connect to lvmetad. Falling back to device scanning.
>    2 logical volume(s) in volume group "xubuntu-vg" now active
> /dev/mapper/xubuntu--vg-root: recovering journal
> /dev/mapper/xubuntu--vg-root: clean, 158302/7217152 files,
> 1556087/28865536 blocks

This seems to mean that you had LVM enabled. I do *not* recommend LVM
for such an old, low-end machine that maxes out at 4GB RAM.

The only reason I can think of that it might be enabled automatically
is if you enabled disk encryption. I also would _not_ recommend that
for an old, low-end machine.

Try a 20.04 bootable USB or DVD. If it managed to mount your hard
disk, back up all your stuff, and reinstall.

By default the machine has a 160GB hard disk. I would partition it as so:

[/dev/sda1 primary] 32 GB, ext4, as root ("/")
[/dev/sda2 extended partition for the rest of the disk
[inside that:
[ /dev/sda5, ~124 GB, ext4, /home]
[/dev/sda6, ~4 GB, swap]
] <- end of extended partition

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