Re: laptop in a bad place - won't boot
It sounds like you have a problem with your lilo configuration. You
may have more severe problems, including filesystem corruption.
Was the system ever bootable? If so, when did it stop being so?
Try booting a rescue distribution -- not your Debian rescue disk, but
something like Tom's Root/Boot (http://www.toms.net/rb/), or the
LinuxCare Bootable Business Card (BBC). These boot a ramdisk-only
system, and should allow you to test your system's integrity and
reinstall LILO.
On booting the rescue disk, do:
e2fsck /dev/hda1
Mount this to some useful place, say /mnt on your rescue system, and
reinstall LILO with the -C flag to specify the system (not rescue)
lilo.conf:
lilo -C /mnt/etc/lilo.conf
You may want to test this first with the -t flag.
If you continue to have problems, respond with more information,
including your disk partition table (fdisk -l /dev/hda), your lilo.conf
file, and any error messages produced when you run lilo.
Good luck.
On Wed, Feb 16, 2000 at 11:17:42PM -0800, Michael Kevin O'Brien wrote:
> Hola~
>
> I have a laptop that seems to be beyond help. When I try to boot it, I get:
>
> Kernel panic: No init found. Try passing init= option to kernel.
>
> What exactly does this mean? When I boot the rescue floppy, then type rescue
> root=/dev/hda1 I get:
>
> VFS: Mounted root (ext2 filesystem) readonly.
>
> but, the system hangs (or at least doesn't change for over ten mins. When I
> boot the rescue floppy, then type rescue root=/dev/fd0 I get:
>
> Unable to load NLS charset cp437(nls_cp437)
> VFS: Mounted root (msdos filesystem) readonly
> Unable to open an initial console
>
> Now, I'm not sure why this doesn't work. I thought the rescue floppy had a
> bootable version of the kernel on it.
>
> I can start the installation process from the rescue disk. I can mount the
> swap and main partition. I can install the kernel, drivers, and base system.
> However, when I try to make the hd bootable, I get an error dialog about how
> the process failed. (I am assuming lilo reports some error that doesn't make
> it out of the ui.) Is there a way to put the installation script into a mode
> where it actually reports errors instead of generic dialogs?
Won't swear to it, but I believe error messages are logged to another VC
(virtual console). Try <cntl><F#>, which will switch you between VCs,
for numeric values of '#'. Logging occurs on VC 3 or 4, IIRC.
> Is there any hope? Ideally, I'd like to get the drive booting without
> scrubbing it. It would be nice to keep all the code and such I have in my
> home dir. It would be great to keep all the packages I have installed, but
> that's more of a secondary priority.
Even if you have to reinstall Debian there should be no need to
overwrite your /home tree.
> Please cc me on any replies.
>
> MO
>
> --
>
> Michael O'Brie
> mikeo@sgi.com Alias|Wavefront
> 206.287.5634 Polygonist
>
> "This will not look good on a resume."
> -Robin Williams
>
>
> --
> Unsubscribe? mail -s unsubscribe debian-user-request@lists.debian.org < /dev/null
>
--
Karsten M. Self (kmself@ix.netcom.com)
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