Dexter Graphic wrote:
> My Mandrake 8.2 system recently stopped booting.
I'm late to the party, I know. But here are some comments anyway.
Either you had filesystem corruption or boot block corruption. I
can't see any way a different hardware failure would give you these
symptoms. When you run lilo, lilo records, in the boot block, the
disk addresses where the kernel (and initrd.img, if you use initrd)
resides on the disk. If something causes the kernel to move to
different physical addresses, then lilo's pointers are wrong, and you
have an unbootable kernel.
Since the system crashed early in the boot process, it was definitely
loading the kernel incorrectly (which is corroborated by the boot
floppy working).
During the time your system was broken, did you ever run lilo? Did
lilo get run when the automatic fsck cleared the problem? (I don't
think it does automatically run lilo...)
What do you have in /lost+found? Maybe a kernel?
> Is there some way to do a surface scan of the hard disk under
> GNU/Linux?
dd if=/dev/hda of=/dev/null
--
Bob Miller K<bob>
kbobsoft software consulting
http://kbobsoft.com [EMAIL PROTECTED]
