My Mandrake 8.2 system recently stopped booting. After a couple of days of fiddling with it, I gave up and just reinstalled the system from CD. This didn't actually fix the problem but created others which somehow resulted in a solution. But I'm still curious what actually happened.
I would like to hear your theories on what might have gone wrong. Here is a description of the symptoms. Very shortly after making the boot Linux choice in Lilo the system would hang and never continue booting. The last messages on screen and in the boot log were this: Linux NET 4.0 for Linux 2.4 initializing RT netlink socket apm: Bios ver 1.2 Flags The system would boot just fine if I used the Mandrake 8.2 boot floppy or the rescue CD. The events in the boot and system message logs seemed to be identical to the final messages quoted above. I could not see any differences in the steps taken prior to the lock-up no matter which medium I booted from. Here is some additional information that might be useful. I had done nothing to the system, configuration wise, prior to the boot problem. The last time I used it everything had worked fine and there were no errors or crashes. The computer was off the few days since my last use. It is not a dual boot system, only Mandrake. Anyway, seeing that the last messages before lock-up involved the network and advanced power management, I checked the bios configuration for these two features. I disabled both my onboard Intel Ether-Express NIC and the APM features of the bios just to see if this made any difference. It did not. I still got the exact same boot messages prior to system lock-up. The next possibility, I thought, was that some files may have gotten damaged (as sometimes happens with Windows) so I booted off the CD, checked that hda1 was unmounted, and ran fsck.ext2 to see if there were any problems. It reported none found. Is there some way to do a surface scan of the hard disk under GNU/Linux? After reading and trying some of the troubleshooting procedures I found at MandrakeUser, but without success, I gave up in frustration and reinstalled the base system from CD. I did an upgrade rather than a complete wipe, hoping that some of my previous configuration work and software updates would be saved. Well, to my surprise, when I rebooted after the install, I got the exact same messages and system lockup. If I used the boot floppy, however, it would load everything and run just like normal. Feeling overwhelmed and defeated, I said fine, I'll just use the !@#$%^&* boot floppy from now on. Sometime later, after doing some more research in various books I have and online, I decided to go explore the system and boot logs in /var/logs to see if I could figure out what was different when booting from a floppy vs booting from the hard disk. While poking around in there I must have opened something I should not have been messing with because the session I was using locked up. I switched to another session but it soon locked up too. So I logged into another session and tried to shutdown but now that would not even work. The whole system was frozen up. I just turned the thing off the walked away (thinking to myself how much I hated computers.) The next day when I turned the damn thing back on, it complained about not having been shut down cleanly and proceeded to do a disk check. It found some errors and I told it to go ahead and fix them--unlinked fragments and stuff like that. The funny thing is that afterwards it booted off the hard disk just fine. I no longer needed to use the boot floppy or CD. My original problem had somehow been solved. Even though I was glad for that, it bugs me terribly that my computer would mysteriously stop working and then equally mysteriously start working again. This happened last week, and I wanted to ask you about it right away, but I figured who cares, just forget it and move on. But as you can see, I'm still bothered by the need to understand what happened and that's why I have spent over an hour writing all this down for you to help me analyze the situation. Is there any other information I should provide or any additional steps I should have taken that would help make sense of this? Dexter
