Using LinuxCNC With a Mesa 7i76ED, Questions about which version to install.

Hey, I went through all the steps again and LinuxCNC Debian 9 Stretch installed successfuly. Now I am going to set up my Mesa 7I76ED!

Ok Cool

Hey, new problem. The install went successfully, I can reboot and everything. I'm even able to test out the Mesa 7I76ED. Unfortunately, if I walk away from the computer and come back an hour or 2 later, the install totally fails, as if the hard drive has no operating system installed. Super disappointing. I have no idea why this is happening. It's not the hardware that's the problem either.

I have had no issues with the Debian Wheezy install of Linuxcnc. It all loaded up smoothly and in the end the computer worked just fine with the parallel port. But now I want to use a 7i76ED that uses an Ethernet cable. I try to install the latest version of Debian 9 Stretch ISO, and the install went fine, but after leaving the computer running overnight and starting it back up in the morning, the computer screen lit up like normal for a second, then went completely black. I don't know why this happened, the install was working perfect the night before! Anyway, I was tired of using a slow HDD, so I put an SSD in and went through the install procedure again. Perfect, everything works. I set up my Mesa board. At this point I eat dinner and take a break from things, come back 2 hours later and tap on the keyboard and move the mouse. The screen lights up as normal for just 1 second, then it goes black. Totally unresponsive. like it just stopped working. I don't know why. I try turning it on and off, and I'm met with a black screen again. As if the hard drive didn't have linux installed. I mess around with it again for a while, and then decide that there is no way I'm going to be able to get this to boot up again so I plug in my USB drive with the Linuxcnc AMD64 Iso and reinstall Linuxcnc. This time, at the very last step, I get an error. "The ext4 file system creation in partition #1 of SCSI2 (0,0,0)(sdb) failed. Basically I can't finish the graphical install. F U C K. This happened before to a HDD I tried this on before. I guess I should format the HDD and SSD and try again. Maybe there is a problem with the ISO file I have on the thumbdrive? Maybe I didn't go through the steps correctly when I installed Linuxcnc? I'm not sure. I've done more troublshooting than I've written down here of course. I don't know. Has anyone else had this problem?

You are saying there is nothing on the hard drive and you have to reinstall ?

Or is the screen just blank ?

Maybe I can add to this as I've been trying to install Linuxcnc (older ubuntu version) for the last few days.

At first I was getting errors at the grub install phase. Problem was possibly a bad DVD disc, but more than likely the DVD drive in the cnc computer was dirty/old. I put the burning DVD drive from the computer that burned the DVD into the cnc computer and then everything installed correctly and quite fast.

Sometimes, after a seemingly successful install, I would get the blank screen, flashing curser after BIOS posting and seemingly nothing would happen. Not sure on that but it may have been a boot order setting in the BIOS, or a corrupt install.

What I've found during all of this is, it seems you can get a "sort of working" install, but it's not right.

Also, if you hold the shift key down during BIOS post, keep holding it, the grub menu should come up, giving you options of exactly what kernel/etc you want to boot from.

Going by the OP’s last error it looks like he is either trying to install to the USB stick he booted from , /dev/sdb or he has a second hdd that is failing.

I’m going to guess there is a hardware issue or an operator issue.

If he has a USB keyboard and mouse maybe it is not waking the machine up. This could be a bios setting issue. Not knowing the motherboard or machine type really makes it hard to diagnose, kind of like flinging shit at a wall.

The OP doesn’t mention if he reboots after his fail whether that goes successfully or not. It appears that he just goes to reinstall.