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I'm trying to breathe new life into an old (2005 era) Sony VGN-A190 and have replaced the HDD with a 32GB SD card in a SD->IDE adapter. I've also tried with a PATA compatible SSD, but that would never boot out of the MBR for some reason, this SD card option has been working 'better', but still has a catastrophic problem after a reboot.

My install process is as follows.

  1. Boot from (LUBUNTU) 16.04 LTS DVD using forcepae -- forcepae on the boot command line for this old 32bit system (Pentium M).

  2. Install using Erase Disk option (have also tried LVM option and custom options, get same results)

  3. Reboot as requested, wait for the 'remove install media' prompt, the DVD ejects and I press enter

  4. At this point, the system does a reboot, I get the bios splash screen as expected and then a normal boot up from the SD card. It's blisteringly fast as I expect from the SD card HDD replacement.

  5. Inspecting the disk with gparted shows everything looks normal, the system runs as expected, I can install new packages, upgrade to 18.04 LTS and all is well until ...

  6. When I either REBOOT or SHUTDOWN, I see at the top of the screen a brief flash of a line that seems to be fsck output saying clean and the drive identifier.

  7. The system will not reboot. I get the BIOS message to install boot media and press any key. Doesn't matter if I reboot and change the boot order etc, the SD masquerading as the IDE drive will no longer boot.

  8. If I then boot back to the install DVD and run gparted, it shows a completely unpartitioned SD drive.

This is 100% reproducible and it seems clear that it's the REBOOT / SHUTDOWN action when it has booted from the SD card that is somehow wiping the partition table or otherwise corrupting the drive.

Two questions I guess. Does anyone know what this might be? Second question, can I prevent ubuntu from running fsck at all on shutdown or reboot through the GUI?

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  • It actually has made the system much more responsive and during the period of the first boot after install, it's definitely significantly faster for almost every action, be that installing new packages, launching the browser etc. Although obviously it doesn't seem to work reliably so that's a short lived boost right now. It seems so close to working ... and yes, whilst I could reluctantly put the HDD back and return to the slower performance, that's not really my goal here. The SD card to IDE adapter seems common-ish(?) for reviving older hardware to life - it's based on the FC1307A chip. – Roger Jun 20 '20 at 18:50

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