Help! Major crash in Hamm upgrade!

[Mark Phillips <mark@ist.flinders.edu.au>]

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.


__________________________________________________________________________
_\________/___\______/___________________________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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