Help needed to repair a damaged dual boot Debian System
It is a 3-4 yrs old machine that belongs to my Genealogical Association.
(Intel Pentium 4 - 3.2 GHz - RAM 2048 MB). At the time of purchase, it
was fitted with MSWIN XP ; I repartitioned the HD to have a dual boot
(GRUB) with Debian Lenny and the original OS ; it worked very well in
such config for more than 2 years or so ; I had a mysql server on it,
with mysql databases.
Two weeks ago, while trying to boot the system, the monitor screen had
remained black. Same thing when trying another monitor. So, we took the
machine to a repair shop, where our Graphic card was being replaced ; it
costed close to 200 bucks. Once tested, the machine booted OK on the
MSWIN partition, but it no longer booted on Debian Linux: the system
just waited indefinitely without doing nothing. Error messages appeared
after 4 or 5 long minutes of idling, they mostly said that /dev/sda3 did
not (no longer) exist, and that, perhaps, I should try /dev/hda3. I did
so, editing the GRUB boot command. Debian Linux then booted all-right,
after about 3 minutes of idling. Once booted, the Linux system seemed to
behave normally, as far as I have been able to investigate: Mysqld,
OpenOffice, Firefox etc... seemed to behave as they should. A few things
were abnormal though, may be more many things than those I have
discovered so far. For once, the CDROM drivers did not operate at all on
Debian environment ; under MSWIN one of the two drivers did operate ;
none of the two drives would boot a bootable CD (whatever settings in
the BIOS SETUP), so there is no way that I could possibly launch a
SystemRescueCD bootdisk.
I could try re-partitioning and re-installing, but I am not sure that it
is the best thing to do, since it could end up that some piece of
hardware is disfunctioning or simply disconnected. I would hate having
to return to the repair shop, since I doubt if the tech man is trustworthy.
What I expect, is that someone could help me understand, from my log
files, which piece of hardware is possibly disfunctioning or what driver
has possibly been corrupt because of the graphic card collapse. For
instance, my /var/log/syslog shows some lines that say:
hdc LITE-ON ATAPI CD/DVD
hdc : lost interrupt
...........................................................
........................................................
scsi0 : sata-promise
scsi1: sata-promise
scsi2: sata-promise
...........................................................
ata1 SATA max.................. irq 23
ata2 " " irq 23
ata3 " " irq 23
.........................................................
ata1: SATA link down
ata2: " "
ata3 " "
..........................................................
..........................................................
then, when you get to hda :
pci 0000:00:06.0 device not available because of BAR 0 [fccf000....
collisions]
I could send my log files etc... for your advices.
Thanks in advance for your help
Bernard
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