I'm having some major problems with my sons 1.3 Duron powered Soyo setup. He's
dual-booting Win98SE and v9.2 of Mandrake off an 80 gig Maxtor HD. He's got
384 megs of memory. I've had his system dual-booting with Win and Linux for
about 2 years now - no major problems.
About 2 weeks ago he told me he booted up but couldn't use his mouse. Logitech
optical, USB model. I checked dmesg and there was a complaint about a USB
dependency. I reran "depmod -a" and it seemed to fix it.
About 3 days ago, he lost sound. He has onboard sound. I went thru the MCC and
tried various things, finally having to force it to change to another driver
and sound was returned. Next bootup, USB mouse services were lost again. This
time, depmod -a did not fix it, complaining about a USB problem and
/lib/2.4.xxx/kernel/sound/drivers/vx not being able to be used because I
(root) didn't have permission. I've never seen or heard of this file before.
So...I changed to that directory. No such file, can't rm it. Yet depmod -a
insists its there. Finally, another failed attempt at depmod -a resulted in a
*huge* list of failed dependencies. So...I attempted to boot into CD1 and do
a rescue. This resulted in a kernel panic. Unable to proceed. Well, I thought
I'll try the trick where you repair the system by reinstalling, just not
picking all the packages that are already installed so it just fixes the base
system. Fails at 2nd stage ramdisk. Well. I've got 10.0, boxed set, and
everything important was backed up so I fdisked his Linux partition. I tried
booting into 10.0 and and it failed, various times, at various ram disk
stages. I tried booting with the 2nd CD and then switching, got a kernel
panic a couple of times, and ram disk failures others. I tried rescue with
disk 1 of 10.0 and got the same failures as 9.2. During all this time, Lilo
was still functioning and we were able to boot fine into Windows (go figure
the luck!). Finally, Lilo now reports a "time stamp mismatch" and nothing is
bootable from his system, not Linux (even failsafe) or Windows.
Because its showing the same symptoms with 10.0 and 9.2 (and remember that 9.2
had previously installed fine on this setup and been running since 9.2s'
release) I'd lean towards a hardware problem.
Other than that, at this point, I'm at a loss on how to proceed, short of
dumping the HD and getting a new one (its not that old - about 1.5-2 yrs).
Anyone have any useful suggestions, thoughts or ideas?
Thanks gang.
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Dark< >Lord
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