Re: Cannot boot Debian Unstable after shutdown.
KS wrote:
Hi All,
Today, I booted my dual boot Debian and Windows box to update virus
definitions in the Windows partition. After using Windows for about
5min, I shutdown the machine to boot to Debian. After selecting kernel
2.6.11 to boot in, the screen just showed the kernel, bzimage, boot
commands and stalled there. Nothing happened after that, just a blinking
cursor! (same behaviour for single user and older kernels).
Any guesses to the possible problems will be highly appreciated.
There are two standard boot loaders in debian, lilo and grub, and there
a number of commercial boot loaders available which also can boot debian.
Each of them can be used in a variety of ways to do single or multi-stage
OS boots, and each method provides different possible points of failure,
and each boot loader gives different diagnostic signals or hints when it
fails.
I suspect your description is a little too vague to allow for useful
guesswork. Since I use lilo, I know only its failure modes. It prints
one of the four letters of "lilo" for each of the four initial booting
stages, and then prints a serious of dots (periods) each of which
represents a unit of loaded kernel data (though I don't recall what
that unit is). If you use grub, then I can't help you much, but
supposedly it has its own command line and built in debugging features,
which I've never used.
If the kernel loads but fails during the init process, then that's a
completely different problem. Your description does not match that.
If you want to just be done with it and fix the problem instead of
debugging it, then just boot it up with a rescue floppy and rerun lilo,
grub, or whatever boot loader you use. I recommend debugging the problem
though, since it's likely to recur if you don't fix the root cause.
It seems possible to me that the Windows system takes an antagonistic
view of Linux and will disable it from booting. (At least I've heard
stories about such malevolent behaviors by Windows.) Updating the "virus"
checker would be a perfect pretext for taking such an action, but that's
as far as I will take the guesswork. (Personally I consider Windows to
be a virus, but that's just my own opinion.)
I hope this helps. Good luck.
Thanks,
/KS
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