On 3/23/23 3:09 PM, Roger Heflin wrote:
Did both of the sticks fail to boot in the exact same way? Or did
they fail differently?
Failing to boot differently each time on 2 different sticks (and on
the same stick several times) would make me think that there was an
issue with the USB on the workstation you are trying to boot being
unreliable. It is possible that the 10 year old USB is not 100%
backwards compatible with the usb sticks you have.
What kind and size of USB sticks are you using?
The easiest test is this:
dd if=/dev/<usbdevicename> of=/dev/null bs=64k status=progress
If you get an error from dd there will also be an error in messages
file about the device. if dd reads the correct amount of data (total
size if the stick--roughly) and gets no errors then it is very likely
the USB stick is just fine.
Before opening this thread, one of the things I did after both sticks failed to boot was
to then use Fedora Media Writer to put memtest on one stick, and then use that stick to do
a memory test. That worked. So that stick (well, at least a part of it) is good.
For the second stick, see the attached PNG file "Disks_leftsocket.png" for the
Disks report about it when it's in the left USB3 socket.
Here's the dd output:
-----
-bash.3[~]: dd if=/dev/sdb1 of=/dev/null bs=64k status=progress
2016870400 bytes (2.0 GB, 1.9 GiB) copied, 9 s, 224 MB/s
30794+1 records in
30794+1 records out
2018148352 bytes (2.0 GB, 1.9 GiB) copied, 9.00462 s, 224 MB/s
-bash.4[~]:
-----
When I put the stick into the right USB3 socket, see the attached PNG file
"Disks_rightsocket.png" for the Disks report about it when it's in the right
USB3 socket.
Here's the dd output:
-----
-bash.4[~]: dd if=/dev/sdb1 of=/dev/null bs=64k status=progress
2015559680 bytes (2.0 GB, 1.9 GiB) copied, 9 s, 224 MB/s
30794+1 records in
30794+1 records out
2018148352 bytes (2.0 GB, 1.9 GiB) copied, 9.01046 s, 224 MB/s
-bash.5[~]:
-----
The sticks are Samsung, 32 GB, USB 3.1.
I sensed no pattern to how the boot attempts failed. But I can't be sure since I have
no way of capturing the messages displayed while a boot attempt is in progress, or when
it's done.
By the way, it's the workstation (a tower) that's 10 years old. The sticks are
much newer, but I don't remember when I bought them.
Both USB3 sockets work fine when doing weekly incremental back-ups and looking at files on
those back-ups.