Re: Help needed to repair a damaged dual boot Debian System
Christofer C. Bell wrote:
On Fri, Feb 24, 2012 at 6:08 PM, Bernard <bdebreil@teaser.fr> wrote:
Bob Proulx wrote:
Hopefully you would be able to boot a rescue cdrom. The debian
installer disk has a rescue mode. That can be very useful to repair a
system such as yours. If the above grub selection of a newer kernel
does not work then I recommend using the debian-install disk as a
rescue disk.
Well, but I can't get any of my cdrom drives to work !
Your CDROM drive doesn't work from *within the installed operating
system* (and this point is important). This doesn't mean that the
BIOS can't see it and that the kernel on the rescue CD won't be able
to access it. There is still value in burning an installation CD of
Lenny, trying to boot it, and seeing what works.
Thanks to everyone for your help. So far, I have reached a point where I
wonder if I should quit or test furthermore. Why quit ? Because my
system now * seems * to be working almost satisfactorily, even though
it does so in a different scheme as it did before. Why thinking about
testing furthermore ? Because one of my CD/DVD driver is out of order,
also because I still see some bizarre messages while booting, which
makes me wonder whether I might soon discover some more problems.
What did I do since my last post ? As Richard suggested, I opened up
the box and checked cables around the cdrom hardware. I noticed
something that I thought weird at first: the CDROM blocks were connected
to a cable where one could read: "HD cable", while the HD was linked to
a cable that read "CDROM cable". I then swaped cables, and tested. The
only difference I got was that my Linux system now had to be booted on
/dev/hdc3, while it did boot on /dev/hda3 before. Still, none of my CDs
did operate on Debian, one did operate on MSWIN, none would boot an
autoboot system CD.
This being done, I decided to unplug one of my two CDROM drives, the one
that did not work on either system. I removed all cables from that
drive. This helped a lot, so it seems. My Debian system still boots on
/dev/hdc3, but now my only CDROM drive does work on /dev/hda (hda as is,
not on hda1 or whatever, which I did find weird though). It does work,
and also I am now able to boot on a system CD !! So, I could possibly
decide to re-install... I could also decide to use my machine "as is"
since it now operates almost as it did before, with only one CDROM and
no CD writer (but I don't need that on this particular machine) ; I just
changed the /boot/grub/menu.lst and replaced "/dev/sda3 by "/dev/hdc3".
However... Something still has to be wrong with this machine. Why does
it now reckognises my HD and CD drives as /dev/hdc (hdc1 for MSWIN, hdc2
for swap space and hdc3 for Debian system) and /dev/hda for the now
unique CDROM drive.... while it previously did reckognise these pieces
of hardware as SCSI drives (/dev/sda1, sda2, sda3 for the HD... Nothing
shows if I type:
cat /proc/scsi/scsi
while it previously showed my HD. However, If I plug an USB mass storage
device (key or HD), then it does automount on /dev/sda1 and shows in
/proc/scsi/scsi !
Maybe you could have an eye on my /var/log/syslog or /var/log/messages
files ?
http://bdebreil.free.fr/logFeb28/syslog
http://bdebreil.free.fr/logFeb28/messages
On the first file, you could check first on keywords "collisions"
(device not available because of BAR 0 collisions...), and "scsi0....
sata promise..... sata link down..."
Thanks in advance for you explanations and advices.
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