Re: The sad demise of an etch.
hendrik@topoi.pooq.com wrote:
>> what is your boot manager?
>
> lilo
>
>> did its configuration get corrupted?
>
> Not as far as I know. But I'll try rerunning lilo from the sarge
> system. Both etch and sarge have compatible lilo.conf files.
certainly wouldn't hurt...
>
>> or maybe
>> you've got a bad block?
>
> Hope not. If so I'll have do discard the hard disk *fast*.
yup.
I recommend you boot a rescue cd and do a full fsck on the thing. maybe,
as well, the partition table got corrupted and the kernel can't find the
partition as a result. might check in to that as well.
>
>> I've seen this before on my system and can't
>> remember what it was.
>>
>> does it hang there or drop you to busybox?
>
> It hangs, unresponsive. What's busybox?
>
its the minimal shell provided in the initrd that allows you to repair
stuff if there is trouble booting. sometimes it comes up and can be very
helpful.
>>>
>>> I am tempted to pronounce this etch installation dead and reinstall from
>>> scratch. I'm also reluctant to do this, becase of Debian's reputation
>>> as being the system that never needs to be reinstalled. Sarge, of
>>> course, continues to soldier on without any problems at all (except for
>>> application obsolescence -- but that's spec)
>>>
>>> Or should I do something radical to get current software, such as
>>> installing gentoo on the former etch partition?
>> ack! bite your tongue! ;-0
>
> No... that hurts.
>
> The argument for having gentoo is that it really comes close to
> the *latest* software, and is seems to be free of the version skews
> imposed by package construction using different versions of, say, the C
> and C++ run-times. On the other hand, installation and upgrading take
> inordinately long, and I will no longer have the graceful handover from
> testing to stable, after which the partition containing the former
> stable system is upgraded to new testing.
>
> Oh yes, gentoo is reported to have some stability problems, which is
> unlikely to be worse than what's happening to me with etch now.
fair point.
good luck'
A
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