Dexter, Let me start by saying that I DO enjoy and appreciate your detailed problem descriptions --and sometimes success report, i.e. how you got the CD burner working.
Also my first response was that bits and bytes on your HD are slowly crumbling away. However, if Jamie's remarks regarding "unlinked boot block" solved your problem my comments below are mute (I wrote them before reading the whole story) Such HD problems can be intermittent and non-reproducible, and may not always be caught by/during checks (that's just my guess). The only way I could identified that once on my HD (and a flaky ZIP drive too) was by making a binary file comparison of the offending files reported, using an earlier backup. For backups I usually tar up entire directory branches or partitions of a working installation I feel is worth keeping, e.g. tar -czf distroX_hdbN_boot_date-plusmore.tgz /boot (since I am too lazy to keep notes I put all I need to know into the file name) There are tons of options documented for the tar command and various ways of doing that, but one warning: you may want to uncompress into a sub-directory for such comparison. How old is your HD ? Is it working hard ? (e.g. swap operations) If the HD is going bad there is no point in wasting time on a detailed analysis. My 5c ............................ Horst (on digest). ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ On Tue, 2 Jul 2002, Dexter Graphic wrote: > My Mandrake 8.2 system recently stopped booting. After ... > > 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. > ... > > 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. > ... > > Dexter >
