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PostPosted: Tue Aug 24, 2010 8:40 pm 
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Hi all,

I have a really strange problem with my Acer easyStore H342. I was able to install Ubuntu 10.04 and have been running my server successfully for a few weeks without any problem. I recently added 2 external WD USB drives (1.5 TB and 2 TB respectively). When I issue a 'reboot' or 'shutdown -r now' command, the system shuts down properly but after the BIOS screen comes up, it takes a little longer to detect the USB devices, and then the screen flashes several times and instead of my GRUB menu I get a flashing cursor in the top left corner of the screen. If I power it off and back on, the system will boot properly...

I also noticed that on the initial boot the BIOS screen says Detecting USB devices: 1 keyboard, 2 drives... However, on the reboot it states 1 keyboard, 5 drives.

Anyone else notice this strange behavior...

(I'm using the debug cable and usb keyboard... However, even with these removed it does the same thing.)


Last edited by acerguy on Thu Aug 26, 2010 11:32 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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PostPosted: Tue Aug 24, 2010 9:01 pm 
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I forgot to mention that if I remove the USB drives that the 'reboot' and 'shutdown -r now' commands work properly and the system reboots without incident.


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PostPosted: Tue Aug 24, 2010 9:25 pm 
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I wonder if it's a timing issue, where the drives are spun up and detected after the second reboot? Only speculating, sorry I don't have an answer.

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PostPosted: Wed Aug 25, 2010 3:34 pm 
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Thanks for the response Alex... Actually, it never successfully "reboots"... I have to actually turn it off physically and turn it back on. That works 100% of the time. Issuing a 'sudo reboot' or 'sudo shutdown -r now' causes a hang 100% of the time after the bios screen.

Issuing a standard shutdown works fine as well... This is specifically a reboot issue.


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PostPosted: Thu Aug 26, 2010 11:37 pm 
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Okay, this is a problem with WD Drives which contain hidden partitions that cannot be seen or formatted with fdisk. Sometimes WD calls these Virtual CD's. I had to reformat the drives, which was a pain considering I had to move the data off first. I followed these instructions: http://dedoimedo.com/computers/passport-vcd.html

If you run into a "Media Write Protected" error, you need to make a registry edit which can be found here:
http://www.troublefixers.com/remove-wri ... d-or-ipod/

After doing this I was able to reformat the entire drive into one partition and my reboot errors were completely eliminated... This was pretty unbelievable. Hopefully this post will help others who run into this problem.


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yakuza
PostPosted: Fri Aug 27, 2010 10:48 am 
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Glad you got it figured out and thanks for sharing the solution!

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