Dale wrote:
Hi,
This is weird and I'm not sure what info to give yet. This is the
events tho. First, a raccoon got on the power substation transformer
that supplies power for the whole county, excluding my local city
which has its own transformer. So, we lost power. It was sudden just
like a power switch. Yea, this happens regular here and it ticks me
to no end. It also ticks off the power company because it is always
about 2 or 3 in the morning when the little farts do this. Second, my
system switched to the UPS battery which was beeping and woke me up.
I did a normal shutdown and cut everything off. No problems so far.
Patience. o_O
When the power came back on, I turned on the UPS which turns on the
modem, router, monitor and everything computer related back on. I
waited a few seconds and turned on my rig. BIOS comes up which I
wasn't really looking at, then Grub prompt. I hit enter and got the
"file not found" thing. Well, this is weird. So, I hit a key to try
a older kernel, I keep several older versions around just in case.
Same error. Hmmm. I did a reset and noticed the BIOS is NOT seeing a
single drive connected, NOT ONE. What !! I enter the BIOS and go to
the drive section and try to get it to detect them, nothing. Surely
three hard drives and a DVD burner can't all go out at exactly the
same time. Well, after scratching my head a bit, I reset the BIOS to
defaults, which should be about what it is anyway since I don't
overclock. Still same grub error.
After a bit, I loaded sysrescue from the USB stick. I thought maybe
grub updated and it was having issues so was planning to chroot in and
fix it. Here comes a funny part. When I did a cat /proc/partitions
from sysrescue, all my drives and partitions were there even tho the
BIOS didn't see them. However, cfdisk gave me a error when I tried to
look at the drives. Same error on ALL drives. Now I'm freaking out a
bit. :/ Oh, for you folks who use LABELS like me, write down which
partition is what. If cfdisk doesn't work, you can't tell what
partition is what. ;-) Anyway, while in there I finally started
mounting partitions and seeing what files were there until I figured
out what was what, at least for root and boot. When I did my ls on
/boot, the kernels were symlinks to the kernel sources on /usr which
is not mounted yet. OK. Whew!! That's why grub can't find the
kernel since it is a symlink to a partition that is not mounted yet.
I did find two that were actual files and not links. Thanks goodness
for being a packrat. lol
I reboot and the BIOS shows my drives not as SATA but as IDE.
However, I edit the grub kernel line to point to a good kernel and it
boots. I'm actually typing in it now.
My questions you ask? Why is the BIOS not seeing the drives
correctly? The main BIOS screen sees nothing and it used to print
them on the screen, including the DVD burner. They do show up on the
second screen where AHCI detects drives. Next question, why could
cfdisk not see the drives? Note, I tried all three drives on my
system, same error. I may reboot into the sysrescue thing and try it
again and write down the error.
I'm going to test on this some more. I want to figure this out in
case there is something wrong or I run into this again and can't get
cfdisk to work. I'm also going to print my partition layout too. lol
Oh, from the Gentoo install, cfdisk sees the drives and works
perfectly. The only thing I notice is a "*" way out to the right on
the last partition. Like this:
sda9 Logical ext4 [chroot] 61832.05 *
I'm not sure what the "*" means tho. Any ideas? That is where I do
my builds for a 32 bit install hence the label. It is not even
mounted all the time.
Dale
:-) :-)
P. S. I'll post back as I test things. This is weird. Like me. ROFL
I booted the sysrescue stick and ran cfdisk again. This is the error:
FATAL ERROR: Bad primary partition 3: Partition ends in the final
partial cylinder
Press any key yada yada.
I ran parted -l, it sees everything fine. Could it be that cfdisk on
sysrescue is broken? If parted didn't see it either then I would think
something else but . . . .
Going to google now. Then read up on the manual for my mobo. o_O Oh,
going to figure out this symlink kernel issues too.
Dale
:-) :-)