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Topic: [SOLVED] "Non-system disk or disk error" upon install of Artix Mate open-rc (Read 1012 times) previous topic - next topic
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[SOLVED] "Non-system disk or disk error" upon install of Artix Mate open-rc

My old HP Probook 4510s  has  displayed  " Non-system disk or disk error" when trying to  booti  immediately upon installation

It is not the first time. That was when I tried installing Absolute Linux, 2 years ago.

At the time I nuked the MBR sector and a couple of the following sectors, and proceeded to reinstall my 12 versions of Linux. Lost some data but had a sufficiently good back-up.

This time I am not that lucky. Data is not a problem, as this is a secondary machine, which I nonetheless use intensively for searching and media consumption. an d as an experimental station where I try installation of (to me ) new distributions of Linux.

When I first got the error message in the present case I decide to do some googling before attempting to solve the problem.

 I spent a couple days reading and tried every suggestion I found with the exception of taking out the hard disk. I am not very good at reassembling things.

I have found some videos showing how to take out the hard disk in this model but I have not tried it yet because I found out that booting from an usb pendrive I had access to (apparently) all partitions and files. The HP disk tests resulted both (the long and the short versions) in OK. Fsck did not report any errors or failures.

Furthermore I was able to boot into systems on the hard disk, by booting from an usb pendrive and typing the information from the grub.cfg in the grub prompt.

Not only that but late one night when I was exhausted I misspelled the drive in a rm command and there went the whole hard disk instead of just the intended partition.

So I nuked the first four sectors on the disk and proceeded to install  the same Artix MAte open-rc and  Mint Tricia on the HD and then booted them from the usb's grub. Because when I try to boot from the Hard disk I still get the "non-system disk or disk error" tune.

I installed Artix first and then I was able to boot it from the usb. Then I installed Mint, with a new installation of grub and have been able to booth both from the  usb.

I am writing from one of them right now (Mint).

After every guidance I found in my search and tried, I got always the same error message.

I have had this message also on some usb pen drives,  rather recently, after installing some distros on them.


I have run out of hypothesis now, and I really want to be able to boot in a normal way. Has anyone some idea on how that might be possible ?

Thanks in advance.

Re: "Non-system disk or disk error" upon install of Artix Mate open-rc

Reply #1 –
testdisk / photorec could help recover any lost files, if you need to do that. Make a copy of the drive before you use it further. If the drive is genuinely faulty then they are not that expensive to replace, and it's a bit fiddly sometimes but not that difficult. I'd try unplugging and reconnecting it in case of a bad connnection too. It might just be some kind of software issue though, to do with the MBR and bootloader. And you could look in the BIOS menu to see if you are set up correctly in there, to boot from the right drive in the right way (UEFI or not) with any secure boot or similar disabled.

Re: "Non-system disk or disk error" upon install of Artix Mate open-rc

Reply #2 –
Thanks for your counsel.

I guess i will   try to  disconnect the HD.  But  - just for my nformation -can there be  bad contact, when I can read it, install to it and boot systems in it from a grub in an usb stick ?

Re: "Non-system disk or disk error" upon install of Artix Mate open-rc

Reply #3 –
Anything's possible. Consider the case a contact is present, but a tiny film of corrosion has built up causing a resistance to be present across the connection. A small current flowing may cause no significant voltage drop, but a larger one might do so, for example when the drive spins up. Binary signals are 1 above a certain voltage, 0 below, so again they can be affected in a similar way.
OK, that has low odds of success, but it costs nothing and things do sometimes start working after unplugging and replacing.
It sounds mostly like you have a problem with the MBR and boot loader though - it could need some grub-install / update-grub fix - if you use grub and hadn't done that - but it sounded like you had looked at that and were thinking of replacing the disk  so I was considering the hardware fault side. Also the MBR is the start of the drive and if there is an actual physical fault in that area then it won't work. As I understand it the BIOS reads the first sectors of the drive as it's first move, if they are faulty then it would behave as you say. Replacement is the best fix for that, its probably only around $10-$20 for a used one on eBay, depending on size and technology. Another possible option with less screwdriver action is get a SATA drive caddy to go in the optical bay, fit a second drive, boot from an installation on that after setting it as the first bootable drive in the BIOS and mount the other to access the contents.

And some other ideas,  could it be some BIOS / boot loader compatibility thing? Is there some pattern in terms of isolinux / syslinux vs Grub?
https://forum.artixlinux.org/index.php/topic,1183.msg8513.html#msg8513
A BIOS update (if it isn't already on the newest version) might help.

Re: "Non-system disk or disk error" upon install of Artix Mate open-rc

Reply #4 –
That was indeed much helpful !  It has also confirmed my uneducated suspicioons that there was something about the booting sector.

I will definiteli look into replacing the disk. Time is  much valuable.

As for the bios in this case I have been using this machine with the same set-up for a couple years, always installing linux distros in multi setups, for testing.  I had this problem once  and solved it by dd-zeroing some stuff - don´t quite recall i it was just the 4 first sectors, or a bunch of sectors at  the beguinningor the whole disk, and starting again from zero.

I think I will try this before I get hold of my screwdriver.

just for my ifo, one thing i  has never been able to get clear:  if the first 2048 kb are damaged is it stil posible to read the content of the rest of the disk.? I have alway asumed that without a partition table, the driver would nor be able to locate the sectors.

Thanks a lot for helping.

Re: "Non-system disk or disk error" upon install of Artix Mate open-rc

Reply #5 –
Yes, that's a good point - but perhaps it is using GPT which has back up partition tables in other locations.
You might try seeing if there's anything you can do with Gparted to fix it - that has many helpful features. You can recreate the partition table for example. Also you often have to be careful how you partition things, and leave some blank space especially at the start of the drive, as in some cases Grub may use a bit of space after the MBR, and it's often recommended to leave some space between partitions, and at the end on an SSD to let it reallocate blocks if it wants.
I have 8MiB unallocated at the start, then 1MiB grub bios GPT partition with a bios_grub flag and 8MiB gap to the next partition and so on (8Mib is what Windows uses by default between partitions apparently, and is considered a generous value.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BIOS_boot_partition
Another possibility is completely wipe and test it with badblocks (unless it's an SSD, then you should use the secure wipe command instead) and repartition it with Gparted and reinstall on it then.
When it comes to hardware faults, things can work or not work in apparently random ways. A fault may be intermittent, or the data on the drive may be fine, including the MBR, and it could be an electronic fault stopping the BIOS accessing it, but not the OS, the logical explanation is in terms of transistors, capacitors and circuit design etc.
The fact you had this error on some USB drives too is a bit of a coincidence though, although I've had several faulty USB's, they seem pretty unreliable. If they worked on other machines but not this one it could point to something else and not a hardware fault.

Re: "Non-system disk or disk error" upon install of Artix Mate open-rc

Reply #6 –
Well i did dd-zeroed still one more time -  but this time the whole disk  - and then isntalled CrunchBang and PRONTO !  There it boted nicely and smoothly from the disk.

You have made me aware that  there may be  somei ntermittent  problem waiting to strike again but  I am happy that I found a way of solving it for now.  And for avoiding the screwdriver !

Thanks for you latest post also.  Much  valuable -  for me new  - information

But i stull need help : hw do I mark this as SOLVED ?

Re: "Non-system disk or disk error" upon install of Artix Mate open-rc

Reply #7 –
There are so many different boot loaders, drive partitioning methods, partition flags, software versions and so on that if you had lots of distros then it's possible some incompatible stuff happened, and starting again has cleared it. Also disks have built in fault mitigation, the disk itself will mark sectors as bad and never use them again given a chance, so clearing and zeroing everything could help allow that to happen too.
You can try installing smartmontools and running  # smartctl --all /dev/sd?
In my case it tells me the device is not in the database, then says:
SMART overall-health self-assessment test result: FAILED!
Drive failure expected in less than 24 hours. SAVE ALL DATA.
This is supposedly due to a temperature issue. So I wouldn't entirely trust what it says but it sometimes says something interesting about past errors in the HDD internal log database. 
I think you go back to your original post and edit it, edit the post title to add SOLVED and then there is a button around somewhere to mark post solved, you might have to scroll up and down to see it.