Re: Strange boot problems.

[Jason Wood <jasonwood@cableinet.co.uk>]

On Sunday 30 December 2001 4:36 pm, Jonathan D. Proulx wrote:
> On Sun, Dec 30, 2001 at 04:03:00PM +0000, Jason Wood wrote:
> :# ln /boot/vmlinuz-2.2.19pre17 vmlinuz.old
> :ln: creating hard link `vmlinuz.old' to `/boot/vmlinuz-2.2.19pre17':
> : Invalid cross-device link
>
> Not clear on your larger problems, but this bit I can.  You're trying
> to make a "hard" link which doesn't work across different devices.
> Use a soft link:
>
> ln -s /boot/vmlinuz-2.2.19pre17 vmlinuz.old
>    ^^

Thanks, that led me back where I was originally :-) (That wasn't sarcasm - I 
really am happy to at least know something about the problem)

When I set my links back as they were originally, ran lilo and rebooted, I 
ended up back where I started, with a broken system.

Which was nice, because it let me look at the error messages a bit more.

I tried making a symbolic link with the system was broken, and doing so 
caused the following error in lilo :

/vmlinuz : Too many levels of symbollic links.

(which is why I assumed that I had to make hard links)

The error message whilst cleaning var/run is as follows :

runlevel.dir: input/output error.

This led me to look in /var/run directory.

# ls /var/run
ls: runlevel.dir: Input/output error
ls: lpd.pid: Input/output error
atd.pid       exim       klogd.pid  sshd.pid     xdm.pid
crond.pid     identd     ppp0.pid   syslogd.pid  xfs-xtt.pid
crond.reboot  inetd.pid  pppd.tdb   utmp         xpilots

Looks like I've got something wrong with my file system, and searching google 
for input/output errors, it seems like it was probably caused by a previous 
kernel that I run. (I use 2.4.16 now, I used to use 2.4.12).

All I need to do now is to figure out how to mount the root partition as read 
only, so that I can run fsck on it manually, back to google I go...


Jason Wood