Re: The sad demise of an etch.
On Tue, Oct 24, 2006 at 12:43:40PM -0700, Andrew Sackville-West wrote:
> 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.
The sarge system has no trouble finding, mounting, reading, and writing
that partition. So I'll just unmount from sarge, and fsck it from
there.
>
> >
> >> 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.
No. There didn;t seem to be any kind of shell starting up.
>
> >>>
> >>> 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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