Mr. Huh, meet Mr. Wtf
Jul. 11th, 2005 08:02 amGood news and bad abound here. Lesee, I've now fiddled with Webigail (our server) that she doesn't boot. She dies trying to load any of the boot images on the disk. I also can't get the machine to boot from CD-ROM (a long standing problem) and when I manage to get it to boot from floppy (it doesn't like to read floppies made on the other machine in the office) it usually can't read from the CD. Grrrrr....
I'm currently downloading a new set of CD and floppy images to try, in case its some obscure driver problem causing my boot disks to not work, but I wouldn't hold my breath.
The one thing that I HAVE figured out is that my twin raided drives have suddenly become hde and hdf, not hda and hdb as they were when everything was installed. THAT particular mess may have been caused when I rebooted and it claimed the BIOS saved state was corrupted. I had assumed that was the result of the inability to boot, not the cause, but maybe I was wrong.
In any case, I've restored the BIOS to defaults, and I notice the machine now has a hardware raid screen that comes up and talks about the non-existant sata drives. I don't remember that before. (One of the problems with a Linux machine -- its so long between reboots that I don't remember what the normal boot sequence looks like on this box.) Maybe we had the Sata raid controller disabled somehow, but I can't see anything in the BIOS that would control that. Color me puzzled.
I'm currently downloading a new set of CD and floppy images to try, in case its some obscure driver problem causing my boot disks to not work, but I wouldn't hold my breath.
The one thing that I HAVE figured out is that my twin raided drives have suddenly become hde and hdf, not hda and hdb as they were when everything was installed. THAT particular mess may have been caused when I rebooted and it claimed the BIOS saved state was corrupted. I had assumed that was the result of the inability to boot, not the cause, but maybe I was wrong.
In any case, I've restored the BIOS to defaults, and I notice the machine now has a hardware raid screen that comes up and talks about the non-existant sata drives. I don't remember that before. (One of the problems with a Linux machine -- its so long between reboots that I don't remember what the normal boot sequence looks like on this box.) Maybe we had the Sata raid controller disabled somehow, but I can't see anything in the BIOS that would control that. Color me puzzled.
no subject
Date: 2005-07-11 12:58 pm (UTC)And the hda->hde transmogriffing might have happened if the bios has (re)enabled the SATA controllers and they are considered to be the primary and secondary controller by the motherboard. But it's been a while since I've really fiddled with IDE/SATA/Linux/Motherboard problems so I'm not entirely sure if that might be it, though.
Hmmm... just a thought: can you boot it from a USB stick? Might work better than CDs and floppies.
no subject
Date: 2005-07-11 01:20 pm (UTC)The old kernels failed to boot with the exact same problem the new kernel had. Makes me think more and more its a bios problem.
'Course, now it won't even TRY to boot (dies loading the images).
I don't have a USB stick to try booting from, and I don't have a boot image for that right now, but one may be in my (ongoing) download.