Can't boot anything....
Dear all,
I think I'm in deep trouble. Possibly, it has nothing to do with Debian,
it's a hardware problem, but possibly it has, and besides, it is here that
all the nicest folks are, so I'm asking you.... :-)
OK, I'll take the short version first:
When I try to boot, BIOS (?) does some checking, then goes on to list the
PCI devices, and then nothing... It won't boot from floppy, it won't boot
a Knoppix CD, and when it tries to boot from the HD, it spews out tons of
"01 01 01 01 ".
Apparently, it doesn't even get as far as loading LILO. I can go in and
tweak BIOS settings, and when I've disabled everything except the CD,
insert the Knoppix CD and turn it on, it just sits there for a while, then
shouts something about that there is no system disk or something, in
capital letters... It is apparently unable to detect that there is a
bootable CD in there it can use. Wooooaaaa...
Here's the longish story:
I've been running Debian Woody for the past 1 one and a half year, on a
box with an AMD 1.4 Ghz T-bird, and a single 512 MB DDR chip, Asus A7M266
mobo. It has worked great.
Unfortunately, this box is not connected at the moment (I'm awaiting
an ADSL line), and it has not been connected for some time. Last night, I
decided to experiment some more with kernel compiles, so I printed out
Kevin's fine tutorial at
http://newbiedoc.sourceforge.net/system/kernel-pkg.html
before I went home.
I've been struggling with getting APM to power off correctly lately, so
I've experimented with different settings. I walked through the
configuration, compiled with kernel, but tried enabling ACPI rather than
APM this time. However, in the installation process, I realized what was
probably wrong with the kernel compiles I've done previously: I've opted
to install a boot block using the existing /etc/lilo.conf. So, now, I
wiped out lilo.conf instead, added 'append "apm=on apm=power-off" to the
end of lilo.conf and rebooted.
Everything was really fine! It booted up, and the modules that was not
loaded due to my erroneous configuration of lilo was loaded. Wow. Except
that it probably really was APM I should have had, not ACPI, so
encouraged by this success, I decided to compile in that instead. That's
the only change I made to the configuration. Unfortunately, I didn't make
a boot floppy, but I have a few bootable floppies lying around, mostly
from the installation last year, and I had the Knoppix CD. Didn't think
there would be many unfixable things given I had that.
There were some quesions in the installation that I not quite understood
about MBR, but I chose the defaults and installed. I don't know if I could
have made many severe mistakes there.
Rebooting, and then getting hit with tons and tons of fast moving
"01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 " etc....
I then put in the Knoppix CD, and it did in fact boot, but it didn't
get far before it started reporting many errors. I don't remember exactly
what it said, but it was something about not been able to extract files
from the CD (which is pressed, and know to work well elsewhere). It
stopped with INIT reporting that there where "no more processes at this
runlevel", or something IIRC.
Rebooting with a bootable floppy gave tons of "01 " again. Popping out the
floppy and in with the Knoppix CD, more "01 "'s... Going into BIOS,
changing the boot sequence didn't help a lot. Also tried yanking the
network card, since I don't have a network anyway.
Interestingly, if I disable booting from the HD, I do not get the "01 "'s,
so I think those are somehow connected to the HD. A friend of mine
said he often sees things like that if the boot partition is toast.
However, that doesn't explain why I can't boot from floppy or CD. If I
enable only floppy, it just sits there, _nothing_ happens whatsoever. It
just stops after the listing of PCI devices, the LED on the floppy drive
lights up, goes away, and then, silence. So, it does apparently not see
that there is a bootable floppy in there. If I do the same with the CD, it
does as described about, complain that there is nothing bootable in there,
but there is...
So, it seems if I have the whole boot sequence, it first tries to boot
from floppy, decides it is nothing in there (though it is), then tries to
boot from CD, decides it is nothing in there (though a perfectly fine
Knoppix CD is there), and then goes on to boot from HD, but that ends up
printing "01 01 01 " etc....
Am I fscked....?
Best,
Kjetil
--
Kjetil Kjernsmo
Recent astrophysics graduate Problems worthy of attack
University of Oslo, Norway Prove their worth by hitting back
E-mail: kjetikj@astro.uio.no - Piet Hein
Homepage <URL:http://folk.uio.no/kjetikj/>
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