Le 09.11.2013 09:26, Ray Dillinger a écrit :
I have a strange problem where my computer does not recognize *ANY*
boot device
or boot medium other than one single hard drive where a badly
configured debian
linux is installed. I don't think the particulars of that messed-up
install
are relevant, but I've put a note about it at the bottom just in
case.
I don't understand how it can possibly happen, because I have
completely unplugged
that hard drive, flashed the BIOS of the machine with the most recent
update, installed
a brand new blank hard drive, and it *STILL* doesn't recognize any
boot medium or
boot device unless I plug the drive with that messed-up install back
in.
The machine is an Asus Sabertooth X79 motherboard, IA64 "Sandy
Bridge" architecture,
with an ASUS SATA DVD-ROM in the chassis and a generic DVD-ROM
attached via USB2. If
I don't have the single bootable hard drive (incidentally a 3 TB
Seagate drive)
installed in the chassis, NO device will boot. And if I do have it
installed in
the chassis, no OTHER device will boot.
I am sorry, but I have no clue about how to fix your BIOS. Could it be
an issue related to UEFI replacing BIOS? I do not know.
I want to fix my confused install by creating a clean
"Jessie/Testing" system to
migrate data to.
If you have a working system, then depending on how it is partitioned,
you can boot any bootable ISO image, if your boot loader supports it.
Note that grub, lilo and syslinux at least supports those operations.
However, you will have to tinker carefully:
You will have to not alter the boot partition, since it seems that your
computer only recognize this one. You will also have to avoid trying to
modify the partition on which you will copy the ISO. And you will
probably need to tinker through some problems because it's not the usual
way to use install ISOs, but given your history, I think you will be
able to do so easily.
My main relevant current limitation in using the messed up install is
that "su" and
"sudo" are both broken; to do anything as root, I have to be logged
in as root.
There are some others, and lots of documentation that's just plain
wrong about where
things are installed etc, but not being able to su or sudo is the
most annoying.
A solution different from reinstalling the whole system from scratch,
is to purge everything, removing probable configuration files related to
them, and then reinstall things, with their default configurations.
To do that, go into aptitude, and ask the system to purge all packages.
It will ask you to write a phrase for some of the packages, that you
will not enter (those ones are essential packages).
When all those packages are marked for purge, take care that at least a
linux image and apt-get or aptitude is still here. If you are working
via ssh or other network tool, take care to keep that tool, obviously,
but also network related packages and boot loader. When you are sure
that you still are able to install stuff, apply the changes. You should
have less than 400 packages remaining, and that list can be understood
quite easily in less than an hour.
Next step is to go into /etc, to take a look if things belonging to
purged packages are still here. Theoretically, they should not, but
since your system seems heavily inconsistent, it won't hurt, and since
you will probably never have as few packages, it will be pretty fast to
do.
Then, obviously, return into aptitude, and add what you want. KDE
desktop, I guess. Probably bash, bash-completion, vim or emacs, and
other tools you need. You know which ones better than I.
Next I wanted something from
the "Experimental" distro, so I downloaded it - and forgot to take
"Experimental" out of my debian sources list immediately afterward.
You should not have removed it, but setup a /etc/apt/preferences file.
It's the easier way to install only some packages from a repository, and
it works well.
Over the next couple of weeks, about half the software got "upgraded"
to flaky versions not
available in "Wheezy".
It is strange that experimental stuff has been automatically added.
They should, accordingly to various documents I have read, have a very
low preference, so that they could only be installed explicitly by the
user.
Then I realized I had "Experimental" in my sources, got rid of it,
Added "Testing"
(which by this time was Jessie heading into the current freeze), and
used dpkg to
get RID OF every version of everything that it couldn't still
download.
Again, here, the best solution would have be to use preferences files.
Still according to various documents, giving some packages' version (you
can use regex, so you can specify all packages) a priority higher than
1000 will force the installation of that version, even if there is a
more recent one installed.
Anyway, this is driving me bonkers. If anybody has any clues as to
what could be
wrong on such a basic level as to affect boot behavior on a blank
hard drive and a
net install disk, and that immediately after flashing the BIOS,
please do let me know.
Sorry for both my OT and the lacks of help I can provide you on that
point, but I wanted to point some other solutions that you could use, to
at least make your system coherent anew, even if the BIOS is not fixed.
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