Re: Help: Hosed FS on HP nx8420?
Tim Wood wrote:
> I have an HP nx 8420 Core2 Duo T7400, 2GB RAM, SATA 100GB 7400rpm HDD,
> ATI X1600 graphic card, bought mid February.
Okay.
> I had great difficulty persuading it to repartition the drive. I
> installed the network edition of Edgy, bare system, then upgraded to Sid.
Stop! Edgy is an Ubuntu release. Sid is a Debian unstable track. I
would not expect an moving from Edgy to Sid would be reasonable. I
would expect various problems in that case.
Instead install the Debian stable release Etch and then upgrade to Sid
if you desire to run the latest unstable. However I can't recommend
Sid for newbies. Sid has various issues and one should be fluent with
Debian before using it.
> The partitions:
> sda1 19.75GB NTFS, sda2 52MB FAT, <sda5 ext3 (now ext2) 15.45GB as /,
> sda6 15.45GB ext3 /home, sda7 14.71GB Fat32, 16.9GB free, sda8 1.98GB
> swap> sda4 6.66GB Fat - WinXP installation files.
>
> When I bought it I did not appreciate that it had an embedded security
> chip, which I now think the source of my problems.
What problems are you having?
> On a reboot into WinXP a couple of days ago, it wanted to do some
> updates, so I let it. One of them was for the access to the security
> chip. I don't clearly remember now but I think I disabled the chip on
> the original installation. The update seems to have turned it back on.
What does the security chip do?
> When I installed Linux I used Grub in the MBR and it worked well,
> handing control to the NT loader, when booting WinXP.
Sounds good.
> On rebooting back to Linux after the above update, I was met with Error
> 13, from Grub, though initially I did not recognise it as coming from Grub.
> I won't try to go through the saga of the following 2 days. I booted
> Knoppix 5.1 and tried to chroot into sda5 but it came up with errors no
> matter what I tried.
What were the errors?
> I had amd64 kernels from 2.6.18/20/21/22 and the 2.6.22-1-686. I got to
> the point were several would start to boot but all end up with the sequence:
> =========================================================
> Begin: Running /scripts/init
> Done:
> Done:
> Begin: Running /scrips/init-bottom
> Done:
> run-init /sbin/init No such file or directory
> kernel panic - not syncing: Attempted to kill init
> ==========================================================
That usually means that the initrd failed to provide the driver for
the filesystem and as such the root filesystem was not mounted.
> An fsck came up with heaps of errors, cross linked files etc.
> My /Home partition shows no errors.
> The basic root partition appears intact with /var/lib/pkgstates and
> dpkg/status.
Were you eventually able to get a clean fsck check of the filesystem
or is it still reporting errors?
> If I could find a way to get it running I could re-install the packages
> (there's 1.5GB of debs in the archive). An alternative, if I could find
> a way to extract a list of installed packages, would be to re-install
> from scratch.
If KNOPPIX can't chroot into the system then I don't have hope that
the system would be able to boot. I would drive on it from KNOPPIX
and try to get the filesystems into a clean state, or at least into a
good enough state to be able to extract information from it.
I am really worried that your cross-update from Ubuntu to Debian will
be a continuing source of problems.
Bob
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