Help! System hosed.
Last Friday, the clip holding my CPU heatsink in place broke. Naturally, the CPU got overheated and fried. On Tuesday, I got a new case, power supply, motherboard, CPU and memory. I moved my HD and floppy to the new case and installed a new CDRW/DVD drive. Then, I powered up the system.
It seemed to boot OK. X started up with no apparent problems. I had a bad connection on the CDRW, but that didn't keep the system from working, otherwise.
I set the date correctly and rebooted.
That is where everything went wrong. I got dumped into single user mode to run fsck manually. This always scares me nearly to death. The last time that I did this, I took all the defaults and everything was fine after that. This time, I was not so lucky.
The system now boots with no apparent problems, and I can run console apps with few, if any problems, but occaisonally, messages pop up like:
NET: Reistered protocol family 10
Disabled privacy Extentions on device c02f17c0(lo)
IPv6 over IPv4 tunnelin driver
I have seen this error, or its near cousin numerous times, but it does not seem to prevent me from continuing.
X is another matter. Running startx usually just hangs the system with a blank screen. I just tried it again, however, and the server actually displayed my background color for a few seconds before it died, dumping me back at the console with a bunch of messages like:
Warning: font renderer for :.bdf.Z" already registered at priority 0
and a number of warnings from FVWM, such as:
<<WARNING>> Couldn't load image from /usr/share/imp/2.0/images/wilber-icon.png
I just tried it again: blank screen, completely hung. <CTL><ALT><BKSP> did nothing <CTL><ALT><DEL> did reboot, but nothing shows on screen as the system goes down, it stays blank until the BIOS messages appear after the reboot.
I am assuming that some of my files are hosed, but I have no idea what, or how to fix it. If I do 'apt-get update' it gives me an error about losing the http connection. 'apt-get upgrade' always seg-faults. 'dpkg -l' sometimes works (I got a hard coppy of my installed packages) and sometime doesn't. I just ran it three times, the first time gave me a correct listing, the second time gave the following error:
dpkg-query: parse error, in file 'var/lib/dpkg/status' near line 782 package 'libfreetype6':
field name '$' must be followed by a colon
The third time seg-faulted immediately.
If I can't run either apt, or dpkg, how would I fix this even if I knew what the problem was? Do I have to wipe everything but my 'home' partition and reinstall from scratch and the package listing that I did manage to print out? Is there any way short of this rather drastic approach?
Any help will be greatly appreciated. Please!
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Marc Shapiro
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