An issue with booting SeaTools

[PDP-8]

Side note: I just downloaded it, and Seagate's installer exe created a TC 8.21 bootstick which works out of the box on my uefi-only Computesticks and NUCS.

I duly used it to check my Seagate drive in the NUC, and got the a-ok.  Felt very much at home in the TC gui environment.

Interesting in that it is using ReFIT which makes things pretty and some neato options.

Even though I am booting it from Intel gear, the Xorg.0.log shows it failing to load Intel modules, and falling back to xfbdev, creating xorg subsections and eventually finding/creating something it likes.  Lots going on.

But yeah, maybe there is some video hardware it doesn't get along with.  Of course the college-try of reformating the stick, checking the md5.txt file yadda yadda, might get rid of any low-hanging fruit issues...

But hat's off to Seagate for making TC part of their toolkit for end-users!

[curaga]

Your log shows that Xorg crashed. It's a bug somewhere, and not really much you can do about it.

[Smasher]

I think this is another timing issue though. It looks like Xorg gets started too soon. See what I mentioned before:

if I add "pause" to kernel command line, the screen still goes black. And I think X gets loaded after that pause, so X is not the issue, I guess?

In working version the boot process looks like this (I pick Tiny Core 64 8.2.1-4.8.17 (Xorg, Joe's Window Manager) to boot here):

Code: [Select]

Booting Core 8.2.1
Running Linux Kernel 4.8.17-tinycor64.
Checking boot options... Done.
Starting udev daemon for hotplug support... Done.
Waiting as requested... 4
Scanning hard disk partitions to create /etc/fstab
Setting Language to en_US.UTF-8 Done.
Ignoring swap partition(s) seek as requested.
Loading extensions... Done.
Updating certificates in /usr/local/etc/ssl/certs...
183 added, 0 removed; done.
 Done.
Setting keymap to querty/us Done.
Restoring backup files from /mnt/sdd1/tce/mydata_jwm_Xorg_RC.tgz /
Done.
Setting hostname to box Done.
:: VGA: NVIDIA GF104 [GeForce GTX 460] ...Done
Boot time configuration completed. Press <Enter> to continue.
I the broken version the screen changes right after Loading extensions..., before NVIDIA GF104 driver is loaded.

[coreplayer2]

I think this is another timing issue though. It looks like Xorg gets started too soon. See what I mentioned before:

if I add "pause" to kernel command line, the screen still goes black. And I think X gets loaded after that pause, so X is not the issue, I guess?

In working version the boot process looks like this (I pick Tiny Core 64 8.2.1-4.8.17 (Xorg, Joe's Window Manager) to boot here):

Code: [Select]

Booting Core 8.2.1
Running Linux Kernel 4.8.17-tinycor64.
Checking boot options... Done.
Starting udev daemon for hotplug support... Done.
Waiting as requested... 4
Scanning hard disk partitions to create /etc/fstab
Setting Language to en_US.UTF-8 Done.
Ignoring swap partition(s) seek as requested.
Loading extensions... Done.
Updating certificates in /usr/local/etc/ssl/certs...
183 added, 0 removed; done.
 Done.
Setting keymap to querty/us Done.
Restoring backup files from /mnt/sdd1/tce/mydata_jwm_Xorg_RC.tgz /
Done.
Setting hostname to box Done.
:: VGA: NVIDIA GF104 [GeForce GTX 460] ...Done
Boot time configuration completed. Press <Enter> to continue.
I the broken version the screen changes right after Loading extensions..., before NVIDIA GF104 driver is loaded.

Hello Smasher
 
That's the first mention of Nvidia driver being loaded and is clearly the source of your problems

Install pci-utils.tcz
then run

Code: [Select]

lspci -v
to discover which video hardware is installed

There's too much information we don't know, so upload the lspci results please
There's one more possibility,  if a notebook then it's possible you have an Intel OnChip graphics and a dedicated Nvidia card.  Best to disable one of them in the BIOS before continuing.

If you have a GeForce GTX 460 graphics card you'll need
nvidia-390.116-4.19.10-tinycore64.tcz
Xorg-7.7

Which means updating the Kernel, Tinycore and all extensions to the latest TC-10 Core64 to get Nvidia support for Geforce GTX 400 series through GTX 1000 series dedicated video cards

Use the " norestore " bootcode to prevent interference from any personal files

Remove your current Xorg and all video related extensions then install Xfbdev instead using official package management utilities (tce-load -wi Xfbdev or tce-ab ) to ensure you download only extensions from the architecture in use.

add  Xfbdev.tcz to your onboot.lst
and add the bootcode " vga=791 " to your boot config file

Be sure to remove all the interference from addition video extensions (like modesetting etc. etc.)
I'm assuming a Core64 installation here, not a corepure64 install.


IMO the best hardware support comes from updating TC to the latest version.

[kosnic]

This is an old thread, but hopefully this post helps someone else.  I had a similar issue with Seatools.  It would not boot and kept getting hung up loading extensions.  To begin with I was getting a fdisk error about a device having more than 2^32 sectors.  I resolved this by disconnecting all of my other drives except for the one I was testing.  I tried a few suggestions from this thread without luck.  For the time being, I gave up and reconnected everything and booted to windows.  I did not have that drive connected prior to shutting down to boot from usb so once in windows I found that the drive wasn't showing up in file exp.  Checked device manager and seatools for windows and it showed the drive.  Looked at it with a partition manager and found that it was not partitioned.  After partitioning and rebooting, I was able to load Seatools without issue and with all drives connected. Still didn't solve my problem, but at least I got it to boot.