Re: Help! Major crash in Hamm upgrade!
I posted this message a day ago and still have received no response. I
would appreciate some help since my computer is currently useless.
I have included the two emails I have sent previously just in case
you missed them. But in summary, I suspect the reason for my problems
is that I didn't configure the packages properly when I upgraded to
Hamm. Now I can't even boot from the hard drive. How can I go about
configuring these packages if I can't boot? Perhaps the Hamm installation
disks would allow me to do this? (But of course I don't want to start
from scratch if I can help it!)
Is there anyone in particular I should be sending this to?
Waiting anxiously,
Mark.
---------Forwarded Message--------------------
Date: Sun, 31 May 1998 21:15:53 +0930 (CST)
From: Mark Phillips <mark@ist.flinders.edu.au>
To: debian-user@lists.debian.org
Subject: Help! Major crash in Hamm upgrade!
The last few days I have been upgrading to hamm. I rebooted my computer
and it died badly. Instead of coming up with lilo, it repeatedly typed:
LI
LI
LI
LI
LI
LI
...etc
down the screen. It looks like the boot sector has been corrupted or
something like that, but I don't know what I've done which could have
caused that!
Let me give a summary of what I did:
1. I ran autoup.sh - it had all sorts of complaints, but they seemed to
stem from one particular package that needed upgrading - I upgraded this
package and then reran autoup.sh and everything seemed to run smoothly.
2. I then ran dselect to upgrade my system to hamm (I have mirrored most
of hamm on a hard disk.) The first few times this failed right at the
start - it seems a perl package I had mirrored had problems - but running
mirror a day or two later downloaded a new version of this package and
that seemed to fix the problem.
3. Running dselect install several times seemed to install most things
successfully, but there were a number of packages it had errors with. In
fact it eventually died, complaining that there had been problems with too
many packages to continue.
4. I remember the autoup.README had said that I should reboot the machine
and then change a couple of things. I thought I should do this. Although
not everything had installed properly, I figured enough had for now. Now
I think about it, probably none of the packages had been configured!
Still I don't know how this would affect the boot sector?
5. Anyway, I closed down everything and typed sync followed by
ctr-alt-del. It stopped various processes, but didn't reboot as normal.
Instead it hung. So I hit the reset button and then had the
LI
LI
LI...
problem described above.
6. I put in my custom boot floppy and tried that, but it had a kernel
panic, complaining that it couldn't mount the root filesystem!
7. I tried finding my debian installation disks. I found a rescue disk,
but can't find a root disk!
Now I am up the creek without a paddle! My machine seems completely
stuffed and I've got little idea what to do, or what is wrong. (I also
need to use my machine - obviously I can't.)
The only thing I can think to do is to download a bo root disk, somehow
get e2fsck, and see if that fixes my root partition (which actually
contains almost everything including /home and /usr)
Any help would be greatly appreciated!
Thanks in advance,
Mark.
---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Sun, 31 May 1998 22:56:23 +0930 (CST)
From: Mark Phillips <mark@ist.flinders.edu.au>
To: debian-user@lists.debian.org
Subject: Re: Help! Major crash in Hamm upgrade!
Back again. I've tried a few more things and thought I should report what
I've found. (In case you didn't read my earlier email - I've had a major
crash while attempting to upgrade to hamm.)
I have managed to boot under a rescue disc (I think it's a bo one). I
copied e2fsck from my brother's computer (he runs debian 1.2 I think). I
ran e2fsck on my /dev/hda1 and eventually that seemed to fix my disk.
I then manually mounted /dev/hda1 at /mnt and everything seems still to be
there.
I then tried to reinstall lilo. I did this by copying my brother's
version of lilo onto a floppy, modifying lilo.conf to take into account
the fact that things were at /mnt/boot/.... rather than /boot/.... and so
on. Then I ran lilo, but it complained:
LILO Version 19.....
Reading boot sector from /dev/hda
Merging with /mnt/boot/boot.b
First boot sector is version 20. Expecting version 18.
So this didn't work - probably because my brother has an old version of
lilo???
Anyway, I then tried a custom boot disk I had. It managed to boot -sort
of. It complained halfway through about not being able to run
/etc/init.d/boot or something like that. Then later it complained about
there not being a /proc directory. Eventually I did get a login prompt,
but I couldn't login. It seemed to have booted, but in a pretty broken
state. (As a result I had to take it down without syncing - meaning I
will probably have to run e2fsck again).
So the stuff is still there, but in a pretty broken state. How do I
recover? Help me someone! This is the worst crash I've had with Debian
(probably my own fault though.)
Thanks in advance,
Mark.
__________________________________________________________________________
_\________/___\______/___________________________Mark_Phillips___________/
____\__/_____\__/--\__/__________________________mark@ist.flinders.edu.au/
____\__/HE___\__/------APTAIN/ ________________________________
____\__/_____\__/--\__/______/ /__"To be is to do."__I. Kant___/
____\__/______\______/_______/ /__"To do is to be."__A. Sartre_/
/__"I am."____________God_______/
/__Jesus did.___________________/
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