Intermittent blank screen on boot up

[mdelaney]

Hi

I have an O2 branded Joggler and was previously running the Ubuntu 11.10 build (from http://joggler.exotica.org.uk/ubuntu/) without any problems.

Now I'm running the later Xubuntu 12.04 LTS (Precise) and I'm finding that the device intermittently fails to boot (once or twice in three tries on average). It just hangs and I have to power it off and try again. More specifically, with the USB stick connected I get these two screens all the time whether it works or not:

Screen 1. O2 splash image appears for a few seconds
Screen 2. Grub boot loader

Then when it works I see these two screens:

Screen 3. Black screen with about 12 lines of text, the last of which is 'Scanning for Btrfs filesystems'
Screen 4. Then after a few seconds the Xubuntu desktop appears and all is fine

When it doesn't work, I get either of the following two screens:

Screen 3. Completely blank screen, just hangs

or

Screen 3. Blank screen with fuzzy stripes like an old badly tuned TV, again hanging

My Use cases include XBMC media player, TV catchup, iPlayer and picture frame (using XBMC screen saver to select random images from my server).
To avoid the Joggler being permenantly powered on, it is plugged into a ByeBye Standby plug included in the same group of plugs as my whole A/V setup. This was all working fine with Ubuntu 11.10 but I now these intermittent hangs have started a few months back when I switched to the 12.04 build.

I have tried another USB stick but the same thing happens. I have also tried re-imaging the stick (using Win32 Disk Imager). I would try the earlier Ubuntu 11.10 but that is no longer accessible.

Any help or pointers on how to diagnose this issue would be much appreciated.

Thanks, Marcus.

[Nasedo]

Screen 3. Completely blank screen, just hangs

Maybe its not related, but I did noticed, when I have started Xubuntu 12.04 LTS recently, the screen at the end was blank. I have switched off my Joggler and started once more. I have been surprised, because once more screen was blank.
But... I just not intentionally moved my mouse and screen appears! Maybe is not exactly what you experienced, but it may help.

[Mevi]

A suggestion that I read on a similar older thread was to check that they are shutting Linux down properly and not just pulling the plug. Any help?

Is the Joggler on an 'always on' socket or one that powers off when it goes into standby powersave mode?

[mdelaney]

To answer the two replies so far:

- I'm pretty sure the Joggler is hung as I have the network configured (when it works) and it fails to join the network.
- The shutdown is uncompromising, the red button on the ByeBye remote cuts the power to devices connected to all affected plugs (which includes the Joggler, TV, Amp, Apple Airport express, Wii, Humax ... and my Acer Revo which is also running XBMC and only very rarely compains and stalls on the recovery console. For the Joggler, this was all working before on the 11.10 build.

I'll try startups from clean shutdowns and see where that leads me. If it is something to do with the unclean shutdown, can I force some kind of check on startup?

Is it possible to get hold of the earlier 11.10 build?

Strange that no other users seem to be suffering from the same problem?

Thanks, Marcus.

[mdelaney]

... an update on my investigation.

On further reading of the forums I came across this entry posted by 'kappa__2' which exactly matches my scenario :

http://www.jogglerwiki.com/forum/viewto ... =80#p10048

Following the thread I replaced grub.efi with the one from here as suggested by 'BuZz' ( http://malus.exotica.org.uk/~buzz/joggler/grub.efi ) and so far based on the small number of restarts I've done (i.e. a restart from an abort resulting from the ByeBye standby), it seems to come up OK.

BuZz, what is in this grub.efi that appears to have fixed my problem (I'm comfortable with Linux, but I'm far from an admin ninja)?

Thanks, Marcus.