I posted this message a day ago and still have received no response. I would appreciate some help since my computer is currently useless.
I have included the two emails I have sent previously just in case you missed them. But in summary, I suspect the reason for my problems is that I didn't configure the packages properly when I upgraded to Hamm. Now I can't even boot from the hard drive. How can I go about configuring these packages if I can't boot? Perhaps the Hamm installation disks would allow me to do this? (But of course I don't want to start from scratch if I can help it!) Is there anyone in particular I should be sending this to? Waiting anxiously, Mark. ---------Forwarded Message-------------------- Date: Sun, 31 May 1998 21:15:53 +0930 (CST) From: Mark Phillips <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: [email protected] Subject: Help! Major crash in Hamm upgrade! The last few days I have been upgrading to hamm. I rebooted my computer and it died badly. Instead of coming up with lilo, it repeatedly typed: LI LI LI LI LI LI ...etc down the screen. It looks like the boot sector has been corrupted or something like that, but I don't know what I've done which could have caused that! Let me give a summary of what I did: 1. I ran autoup.sh - it had all sorts of complaints, but they seemed to stem from one particular package that needed upgrading - I upgraded this package and then reran autoup.sh and everything seemed to run smoothly. 2. I then ran dselect to upgrade my system to hamm (I have mirrored most of hamm on a hard disk.) The first few times this failed right at the start - it seems a perl package I had mirrored had problems - but running mirror a day or two later downloaded a new version of this package and that seemed to fix the problem. 3. Running dselect install several times seemed to install most things successfully, but there were a number of packages it had errors with. In fact it eventually died, complaining that there had been problems with too many packages to continue. 4. I remember the autoup.README had said that I should reboot the machine and then change a couple of things. I thought I should do this. Although not everything had installed properly, I figured enough had for now. Now I think about it, probably none of the packages had been configured! Still I don't know how this would affect the boot sector? 5. Anyway, I closed down everything and typed sync followed by ctr-alt-del. It stopped various processes, but didn't reboot as normal. Instead it hung. So I hit the reset button and then had the LI LI LI... problem described above. 6. I put in my custom boot floppy and tried that, but it had a kernel panic, complaining that it couldn't mount the root filesystem! 7. I tried finding my debian installation disks. I found a rescue disk, but can't find a root disk! Now I am up the creek without a paddle! My machine seems completely stuffed and I've got little idea what to do, or what is wrong. (I also need to use my machine - obviously I can't.) The only thing I can think to do is to download a bo root disk, somehow get e2fsck, and see if that fixes my root partition (which actually contains almost everything including /home and /usr) Any help would be greatly appreciated! Thanks in advance, Mark. ---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Sun, 31 May 1998 22:56:23 +0930 (CST) From: Mark Phillips <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: [email protected] Subject: Re: Help! Major crash in Hamm upgrade! Back again. I've tried a few more things and thought I should report what I've found. (In case you didn't read my earlier email - I've had a major crash while attempting to upgrade to hamm.) I have managed to boot under a rescue disc (I think it's a bo one). I copied e2fsck from my brother's computer (he runs debian 1.2 I think). I ran e2fsck on my /dev/hda1 and eventually that seemed to fix my disk. I then manually mounted /dev/hda1 at /mnt and everything seems still to be there. I then tried to reinstall lilo. I did this by copying my brother's version of lilo onto a floppy, modifying lilo.conf to take into account the fact that things were at /mnt/boot/.... rather than /boot/.... and so on. Then I ran lilo, but it complained: LILO Version 19..... Reading boot sector from /dev/hda Merging with /mnt/boot/boot.b First boot sector is version 20. Expecting version 18. So this didn't work - probably because my brother has an old version of lilo??? Anyway, I then tried a custom boot disk I had. It managed to boot -sort of. It complained halfway through about not being able to run /etc/init.d/boot or something like that. Then later it complained about there not being a /proc directory. Eventually I did get a login prompt, but I couldn't login. It seemed to have booted, but in a pretty broken state. (As a result I had to take it down without syncing - meaning I will probably have to run e2fsck again). So the stuff is still there, but in a pretty broken state. How do I recover? Help me someone! This is the worst crash I've had with Debian (probably my own fault though.) Thanks in advance, Mark. __________________________________________________________________________ _\________/___\______/___________________________Mark_Phillips___________/ ____\__/_____\__/--\__/[EMAIL PROTECTED]/ ____\__/HE___\__/------APTAIN/ ________________________________ ____\__/_____\__/--\__/______/ /__"To be is to do."__I. Kant___/ ____\__/______\______/_______/ /__"To do is to be."__A. Sartre_/ /__"I am."____________God_______/ /__Jesus did.___________________/ -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
