It started a couple weeks ago after I updated Mei-chan, I was unable to play the video in mp4 format that I watched a couple days before that, I found it really strange, but didn't really look into it that much, so the next day, I converted what I was watching. Afterwards, I tested some other formats and was unable to play them. After some research, it was because all I wanted to play was under the "restricted format" category, so (I'm guessing) they were removed during that update. I tried to follow the guide I found, but I failed to notice a certain, crucial part of the instructions and ended up not working for me.
I decided to attempt to reverse what had been done, but ended up breaking GNOME and was met with ICEWM upon reboot. I looked for other GNOME Linux distros, as Ubuntu was Unity, and I've had troubles installing Debian properly (with GUI). I let Sabayon 13.08 download (Sabayon is now a rolling distribution, since Gentoo is) as I slept, and the next day, attempted to test VLC out, but Rigo decided to update Sabayon as a whole, which wasted a few hours and ran out of RAM. I did a slight retry, trying to make sure I was only doing VLC, but no luck, so I moved on to trying a test install on a "spare" hard drive. Something happened, to which I'm not sure of, but I think I can blame Sabayon for it, but GRUB kept saying a disk wasn't present and just stopped there.
I scrapped the test install, and went with a blind install, but was met with the same message. Since I was frustrated, I decided to scrap Sabayon and try to find something else. Then I remember finding Ubuntu GNOME while I was digging around the previous night, and downloaded it. After doing some testing, I found it worked well enough for what I wanted and was using Rhythmbox 2.99 instead of 3.0, which made me happy; I wasn't too ecstatic about GNOME 3.8, but it was better than 3.6, and so I went with it (I turned off the shell for the user menu that added the sleep and hibernate options).
I did the install, and came to the same GRUB error; I tried installing again and no change. I unplugged the other two drives (music drive and files drive), and was able to boot. I then plugged the drive under it, booted, and met with the same error. I then unplugged that drive, and plugged in the drive under that one, booted, and had no problems. I then use Parted Magic to look at the drive some, and found that it somehow got flagged as boot (along with the root drive that should have been the only one), so I remove the boot flag, and reboot with all three drives, but still had the problem.
I booted into Ubuntu GNOME live (because the lack of GParted on openSUSE live was against my better judgement) transferred all the music over to the files drive, recreated the partition table twice in GParted (just to be safe), formatted, then put the music back on. I rebooted, and then sat at a black screen with a blinking cursor. I decide there's probably some problem with the files drive as well since I formatted that drive way back with openSUSE 11.3, so I backed up whatever I wanted to keep handy or didn't have on the music drive, did the same as the music drive (minus one partition table recreation), then put everything back on. Booting up gave the same result.
As I went to bed, I thought of what could be different, why I was able to boot to live, but not to the hard drive, and eventually, before I fell asleep, I figured I should look in BIOS. The next morning, it took me a bit to remember, but I looked in BIOS, and it turns out that the drive order was completely backwards (files->music->root), so I fix it and double check the boot device order was correct before exiting. Sure enough, it's what was it and I was greeted with GNOME.
So I've been decently content up until this past Sunday (22nd) when I was unable to really do anything on the internet with Windows on Triela (I'm not going into all that much detail on this) at my friend's place and the next day after (making it Tuesday, since I was sick Monday) at home, I was still having problems, and I reinstalled Windows. I didn't really feel like doing much else, so I left it and worried about it yesterday (Wednesday the 25th), after all said and done, I went and looked up how to reinstall GRUB2 and was successful on the third attempt (first one I found gave me an error with no workaround, second one didn't actually install, and the third time I combined the two solutions).
Quite happy I didn't have to reinstall 13.1 at all. I decided to give the restricted format installation a try, since I had went over the page again a bit more thoroughly this past Sunday out of boredom and noticed I missed a step. I removed VLC, removed the repository for it, then proceeded with the instructions and rebooted. It worked!
Today, I decided to test with Melty, to see that it played before upgrading, then seeing it couldn't play after upgrading, both results were to my expectation. I then preformed the installation and then rebooted and was successful in playing the video.
So, I will be reinstalling 13.1 on Mei-Ren again and preforming the restricted format installation to be able to watch videos. While I love Rhythmbox 2.99, I'll still stick with Amarok because I know how to use zypper a lot better than apt-get, and I'm a lot more comfortable doing the upgrade with zypper than to wait for the software updater to pop up telling me there's stuff to install. I'm also giving up the fact that I can use hotkeys on the video window of VLC in Ubuntu GNOME, but it's not that big of a deal to me, since I've been dealing with it for quite sometime now.
Was quite a long journey that kinda ended where it started (?), but maybe it's a good thing. Few things I've learned:
- Sabayon ships with FGLRX on the disk and uses it by default for AMD/ATI GPUs (had to xdriver=radeon at boot)
- Ubuntu GNOME is an okay fall-back distribution
- Make sure drive order is good
- Boot flags have to be "formatted" away
- Read the entire instructions and follow verbosely to the end
- Rigo does things in ways I don't like
- I gave up on openSUSE too early
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