So, my dad’s Dell Inspiron 1210 (Mini 12) finally died after years of service. I had moved it from Ubuntu to Windows a few years ago, but now it was properly dead. Dad’s friend had diagnosed a dead hard disk. And after much work I decided I agreed, though the BIOS was behaving badly. I used Clonezilla to boot to DOS and refresh the BIOS, and this helped, but in the end it was the disk.
I dismantled the laptop using Dell’s own instructions and found a disk I’d not seen before, a ZIF (zero input force) 1.8″ drive. I’d never met ZIF before and had no clue how to release it. Eldest daughter suggested pull it out, so I did, but I later found on youtube that there is indeed a clamp you release.
Anyway, I tried a large variety of methods to make a functioning machine. I wanted it to boot of an SD card and bought a 16GB in town. But booting from USB or making an image on the SD card was endlessly frustrating.
In the end, I sought out (with wife’s help) an old USB DVD. This got me moving forward, and I finally got Mandriva installed, though the display looked awful. Ubuntu 10.10 then worked, and I then thought I would go the whole hog and go for the latest version of Ubuntu LTS (Long Term Support).
Installing was interesting. Booting from a USB gave me weird display issues, but booting from the DVD was fine. I installed to the SD card but the install failed at “install bootloader”. I figured all the files would be in place and I just needed to get a bootloader working. Thanks to it being an SD card it was easy to whack it in my main laptop. Much searching got grub installed , I just had to find where it was mounting (/media/
sudo grub-install –root-directory=/media/
This got the sd card in the 1210 to boot to the grub prompt. More searching found three commands to get it booting:
grub> linux (hd0,1)/vmlinuz root=/dev/sda1
grub> initrd (hd0,1)/initrd.img
grub> boot
Then I was in and it booted fine – all the files were there. Sadly the display was a complete disaster, a known problem.
So ctrl+alt+f1 got me a command prompt to get grub working properly, which was as simple as:
sudo grub-install /dev/sda
sudo update-grub
Then I needed to work on the display issues (it was booting to a blank screen or half a screen of garbled nonsense, depending on its mood. Back to ctrl+alt+f1 (the dist-upgrade took a while)
sudo apt-get dist-upgrade # this takes a while
sudo shutdown now -r # this reboots
The last stage was to follow the Ubuntu wiki for the problematic Intel gma 500 graphics card.
sudo service lightdm restart
I was just following the wiki by now:
Ubuntu 12.04
With the default settings, Ubuntu 12.04 boots to either a black screen or or top half screen.There are several potential solutions: console=tty1, disable splash, or 915 ResolutionOption 1 – console=tty1
Perhaps the easiest method is to use “console=tty1” as a boot option.
gksudo gedit /etc/default/grubFind the following line: GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT=”quiet splash”Add console=tty1 in between the quotes, the end result looking as follows
- GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT=”quiet splash console=tty1″
save and exit, then update grub withsudo update-grub
And now it works perfectly and seems very smooth.