Re: The sad demise of an etch.

On Tue, Oct 24, 2006 at 12:43:40PM -0700, Andrew Sackville-West wrote:
hendrik@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx 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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