[5095] in RedHat Linux List
RE: I killed my box.... :-(
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Rob Walker)
Mon Nov 18 23:51:43 1996
Date: Mon, 18 Nov 1996 20:47:43 -0800
From: rob@cisco.com (Rob Walker)
To: redhat-list@redhat.com
Reply-To: rob@cisco.com
Resent-From: redhat-list@redhat.com
Okay, I found out some more interesting things by alt-f2-f5'ing at
different stages of the install. I found that there is a time where
the box does a mount of the hard drive by hand, and runs fdisk on it,
and then umounts it. It does this just before presenting me with one
choice to use as my root partition. I think if I could mount the root
partition, I could try some more things on that hard drive. Such as:
copy the kernel off the disk to a floppy, remove a few files that
might be causing me to have a full disk??? (fd will not tell me
anything...)
any other ideas?
rob
rob>
rob>Actually, it is a box here at work. Too bad that it is semi critical!
rob>
rob>How do you make a rescue floppy again? (seriously, how?)
rob>
rob>The affected machine is running RH3.0.3, with the aic7xxx drivers, on
rob>an AHA scsi card.
rob>
rob>I messed something up, but cannot remember what it is. It is
rob>coming to me now, in fragments. I had mkfs.ext2 a floppy in fd0.
rob>Then I tried to cp something to it. It started erroring out. And
rob>locked up the root login, HARD. The other user that was on ALT-F2
rob>could su -, but could not kill the cp process. I tried with a
rob>kill -9 more than one time.
rob>
rob>but wait! there is more!
rob>
rob>I grabbed the rh4.0 install disks, and told it to do an upgrade. The
rob>upgrade went okay, up until the part where it asked me if I wanted to
rob>customize the packages that would be upgraded. I thought I was going
rob>to be able to customize them, when I hit enter, but it started to do
rob>the upgrade. This upgrade was going to take too long, so, when it was
rob>on a part of the upgrade that I did not care about (abuse, I believe),
rob>I hit the reset switch. I believe this was my fatal error.
rob>
rob>bummer. I found that lilo would only give me a LIL-, and so I am
rob>wondering what to do. I have tried to redo the upgrade, and this is
rob>what happens. It boots okay, and starts the install. It mounts the
rob>cd properly, after scanning the scsi bus okay. When it is time to
rob>mount the hard drive, it asks me if I want to use /dev/hda1 as my root
rob>partition. I glean from this that fdisk found that as my linux
rob>native partition. Am I correct?
rob>
rob>I then am told that it is looking for the packages to upgrade, and
rob>after some churning (rpm -qa ???) I get a weird error on my screen.
rob>It cuts through all the dialog stuff, and says, white on black,
rob>Data Type 9 not supported, rebooting system.
rob>Then I get a hard reboot.
rob>
rob>Which console do I need to look at to get more error messages?
rob>
rob>I just checked out lilo docs, and it says that LIL- means that
rob>
rob>the descriptor table is corrupe. This can either be caused by a
rob>geometry mismatch or by moving /boot/map without running the map
rob>installer.
rob>
rob>Interpreted, this means, "You forgot to run lilo after making
rob>changes"? If so, I can understand, as the installer might have
rob>installed some stuff, including the new 4.0 modular kernel, and then
rob>it did not rerun lilo yet. Am I correct? Also, if this is the case,
rob>can I somehow use ALT-F2 to get to bash to rerun lilo by hand? but it
rob>does not have a good /etc/lilo.conf file?!?!
rob>
rob>Oh, booting with the 4.0 boot floppy, and using
rob>linux root=/dev/hda1 (through hda5) does not work, either. I get
rob>kernel panics because of not finding a fs on the correct device. Do I
rob>need to try this with the alternate image disk?
rob>
rob>Needless to say, I do not want to upgrade this system, but just want
rob>to be able to boot it and get it working again, so we can back it up!
rob>
rob>tia,
rob>Rob
rob>
rob>PS. please cc: me, as I only get the digest version.
rob>
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