Re: [Help] resc1440.bin (kernel) crash
On Thu, 20 Aug 1998 joost@pc47.mpn.cp.philips.com wrote:
> On Thu, 20 Aug 1998, Jimen Ching wrote:
> > Please help me. I accidentally hosed my linux upgrade and need to
> > reinstall from scratch.
> Hmm, how far did your system fall beyond the edge? Chances are that you
> may very well be able to fix things and complete the upgrade.
Really bad. Here's the story if you're interested.
After I upgraded to hamm (no problems encountered, good job), I noticed
some obsolete packages, which I progressed to remove. I did this in steps
so I don't harm my system. I did all of this in X, which may be my first
mistake. Everything went fine until the last obsolete package, 'base'. I
got the warning about _knowing what I was doing_ to proceed. I made the
assumption that since the new version is installed, there's no problem
with uninstalling this package -- my first big mistake. The system is
still usable, but all of my devices in /dev just disappeared. I don't
know what else is missing.
I was able to retrieve most of the devices by running '/dev/MAKEDEV
update'. Unfortunately, this did not recreate the pty's or the tty's. I
couldn't find any manpage or document on how to create pty's (didn't look
that hard yet, due to the next thing I did). My next big mistake was
trying to login from the console. As you guessed it, no tty == no login.
What got my goose was that, when I tried to return to my X session
(ctrl-alt-f7), the X session disappeared. The only shell I had access to
just disappeared from under me. I didn't think rebooting would help since
I can't login anyway (no tty).
Here's my third big mistake. I got the idea that if all I wanted was to
get the pty/tty's back, just reinstall 'base' from my previous
distribution. I did this by going back to my previous Debian version, 1.1
(I upgraded to 1.2 but that was from a cdrom I borrowed from a friend,
which I no longer have). I proceeded to install the base system, which
was stupid, because it installed a whole bunch of other stuff (libs, fs
admin tools, etc). This hosed fsck, which means the kernel can't do the
fsck at boot time, which causes me to dump into single usermode(?).
At this point, not much works. Instead of reinstalling the 1.1 release,
which I know would work. I thought I might has well install the 2.0, so I
don't have any libc5 stuff on my system (which was what I wanted to
remove in the first place). That's when I tried the rescue/root disk.
>From the above, you would think I'm no newbie. But somehow, I've must of
executed the F0 0F instruction and my brain halted. ;-) I've never
thought I could hosed my system this bad. :(
> Peculiar. Can you reproduce this? If so, you might want to consider
I was able to run mount, which means I got access to the 2.0 cdrom (from
cheapbytes). I tried all of the disk images, tecra, fast, etc (even the
dos install method, yes I still have a FAT partition). All of them had
the same problem. I finally tried the aic7xxx=no_reset(0), this did not
produce an 'Aiee! Killing interrupt handler', but it died later with some
'scsi0:' message (froze hard).
I did check LinuxHQ for the 2.0.35 release. There was a fix to the
adaptec scsi cards. But no mention of AHA-2842. I'll compile 2.0.34 and
try it just to make sure. But I think the problem is fixed.
> an empty filesystem after the kernel boots. With initrd support, it loads
> the rootfs image into ram before actually booting the kernel.
> On the image you should then set the rootdevice to /dev/ram0 (IIRC)
> because the kernel makefile makes it default to the rootdevice of the
> machine your building on.
I'll compile with initrd and try again. Just a note, the install.bat file
uses /dev/ram, not /dev/ram0. I did not see a /dev/ram in /dev. I do
have some questions about the upgrade procedure, if you don't mind.
1. How does one remove all libc5 stuff off the system? I didn't see any
option to remove all of the libs and stuff.
2. Why was the package 'base' from Debian 1.1 still listed as an
installed package? Doesn't base-files or some other package replaced it?
If there's a new version of the 'base' package, why is it listed under the
obsolete section? Shouldn't it be under required/current?
3. What is the difference between the libc6 and libc6-dev? What is
considered a development library? Is it needed to develop libc6 only, or
any development at all, i.e. C++/X programming?
Thanks for the quick response.
--jc
--
Jimen Ching (WH6BRR) jching@flex.com wh6brr@uhm.ampr.org
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