Dex,
Damn your long winded! you make me look laconic :) So... your boot issue. My
guess is your original boot block had an issue (not being properly linked?)
and the fsck ran by the boot process probably re-linked to an alternate boot
block (Ive seen this before, but had to manually hit y to do so... it may
have not prompted you?). The message Ive seen does specify that its boot
block, not part of the rest of the filesystem, it even mentions the specific
locations. However... this is just a guess... I couldnt say difinitively
anything other than it sounds like something to do with your secondary
storage device.
Jamie
Sometime just before Tuesday 02 July 2002 11:35 am Dexter Graphic Wrote
about:[EUG-LUG:3239] Dexter's boot troubles
: 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
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