Re: No keyboard at boot in Debian

On 2008-01-20, Shadow_7 <wwwShadow7@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:


I was recently toying with my ATI drivers and a new kernel. Now when I
boot it appears that /proc isn't mounting and udev is consequently
failing. And when I get to the logon prompt I have no keyboard to enter
anything to proceed. I'm not quite sure what went wrong, perhaps the
disk is starting to fail (laptop a little over a year old). I moved udev
to start later in /etc/rcS.d/ and it barks at sysfs not being m
ounted.
Basically /proc is failing and udev is failing.

Is the /proc mount point still there and the entry in /etc/fstab?
Try booting the good install and running fsck on the other / partition.
smartctl should tell if something is wrong with the hard disk.

Is there anyway to salvage this install? I installed a new to another
partition and can use chroot to go into this install and function
normally. Except for ktorrent that doesn't want to start. Even though
sylpheed, pan, freecraft, stratagus, ... start just fine. I'm not quite
sure why /proc isn't working and causing other things to fail in turn.
But what can I do to bring this install back to life? FYI It's a
debian / unstable with fairly recent updates. To include a 2.6.23.14
kernel. This boot issue seems to affect previous kernels as well.

It boots, I just don't have keyboard control to do anything. It's
probably not the kernel as I used it's config on my current debian /
stable (etch) install. And previous functioning kernels suffer the same
ill effects. Fortunately the acpid does the power button shutdown -h now
stuff so the filesystem isn't corrupted. At least not by traditional
means. Any hints, tips, guesses what went wrong?

I really don't want to scrap it as I'm on dialup. And it's taken a
considerable investment in time and bandwidth to install all of things I
have installed. To include most every audio app, and game available.
Plus mplayer codecs and timidity soundfonts. Sure I can duplicate that
stuff on the other install, but I'd rather not if all I have to do is
move X to Y and be golden.

I do tend to be minimalistic in what I run. And have otherwise moved a
lot of /etc/rc?.d/ scripts to prevent certain things from starting at
boot. Like portmap, dbus, hal, mysql, apache, cupsys, proftp. On dialup
it's just nicer to have everything installed so you can use it when you
get around to it. Even though you don't want them starting and running
everytime you turn your computer on. Nothing I have moved should have
affected the keyboard, /proc, and udev.

I do not boot into a gui, and otherwise use startx to start a gui. I
find it works better for me. And perhaps uses less battery life when
remotely leeching off of a wifi hotspot to do any massive debian
updates. I don't really need a gui to do the dhclient3 wlan0 && apt-get
update && apt-get dist-upgrade stuff. And otherwise shouldn't be gui
dependent when toying with video drivers and xorg updates. Anyway,
enough rambling for now.

Suggestions? I really don't want to spend the next few weeks/months
getting back to point B (over dialup) when I am already there, aside from
that boot/keyboard issue.
.

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