Shared install instability

stuarte

Hi,

I have just used the same dvd to install Debian Bookworm 12.6 on a pair of laptops. Both laptops had their hdd's completely(!) reformatted with one of them receiving a new partition table. Now both machines are showing similar instabilities very(!!) early in the (cold) boot process.

With laptop 1, the first thing that appears on screen after the GRUB boot screen are two and a half rows of "~[[4~"s (without quotes). These are then replaced by two lines of text. It is at this point that the screen starts flashing various shades of slate grey. During the flashing lines of text keep appearing until they stretch down the height of the screen. At this point the flashing ceases and the rest of the boot up sequence proceeds normally. Another problem on this laptop is that vertical slider bars (Firefox-esr, Dolphin) automatically scroll to the bottom. With Firefox-esr this causes more of the web page to be downloaded, which causes the vertical scroll bar to automatically move to the bottom, and so on. In fact, a similar "misbehaviour" occurs at the GRUB boot menu with the highlight line automatically appearing at the second (i.e. the bottom) line of the menu.

With laptop 2, the first thing that appears on screen after the GRUB boot screen are three acpi errors. Initially, these appear in a some what large font. The screen then momentarily turns black after which these three errors return this time in a smaller font. At this point the system autogenerates "d"s across the screen. Left unchecked, these would attempt to fill the screen. It is only the appearance of subsequent boot up text that prevents them from doing so.

The commonality here is that both "misbehaviours" occur at the same very-early point in the boot up sequence. So I am thinking that something has survived the reformatting (both laptops are still using the old style BIOS) and this something must be in the MBR. I have done a web search and found out that the MBR can be inspected but this just shows a sequence of hex op codes. I now know that there are a couple of hex editor packages that can display these codes but they are hard to understand, even with that column on the right that shows entries that are something like English language.

So, are there any tools that might point me in the direction of where to look next ?

Stuart