Tim Wood wrote: > I have an HP nx 8420 Core2 Duo T7400, 2GB RAM, SATA 100GB 7400rpm HDD, > ATI X1600 graphic card, bought mid February.
Okay. > I had great difficulty persuading it to repartition the drive. I > installed the network edition of Edgy, bare system, then upgraded to Sid. Stop! Edgy is an Ubuntu release. Sid is a Debian unstable track. I would not expect an moving from Edgy to Sid would be reasonable. I would expect various problems in that case. Instead install the Debian stable release Etch and then upgrade to Sid if you desire to run the latest unstable. However I can't recommend Sid for newbies. Sid has various issues and one should be fluent with Debian before using it. > The partitions: > sda1 19.75GB NTFS, sda2 52MB FAT, <sda5 ext3 (now ext2) 15.45GB as /, > sda6 15.45GB ext3 /home, sda7 14.71GB Fat32, 16.9GB free, sda8 1.98GB > swap> sda4 6.66GB Fat - WinXP installation files. > > When I bought it I did not appreciate that it had an embedded security > chip, which I now think the source of my problems. What problems are you having? > On a reboot into WinXP a couple of days ago, it wanted to do some > updates, so I let it. One of them was for the access to the security > chip. I don't clearly remember now but I think I disabled the chip on > the original installation. The update seems to have turned it back on. What does the security chip do? > When I installed Linux I used Grub in the MBR and it worked well, > handing control to the NT loader, when booting WinXP. Sounds good. > On rebooting back to Linux after the above update, I was met with Error > 13, from Grub, though initially I did not recognise it as coming from Grub. > I won't try to go through the saga of the following 2 days. I booted > Knoppix 5.1 and tried to chroot into sda5 but it came up with errors no > matter what I tried. What were the errors? > I had amd64 kernels from 2.6.18/20/21/22 and the 2.6.22-1-686. I got to > the point were several would start to boot but all end up with the sequence: > ========================================================= > Begin: Running /scripts/init > Done: > Done: > Begin: Running /scrips/init-bottom > Done: > run-init /sbin/init No such file or directory > kernel panic - not syncing: Attempted to kill init > ========================================================== That usually means that the initrd failed to provide the driver for the filesystem and as such the root filesystem was not mounted. > An fsck came up with heaps of errors, cross linked files etc. > My /Home partition shows no errors. > The basic root partition appears intact with /var/lib/pkgstates and > dpkg/status. Were you eventually able to get a clean fsck check of the filesystem or is it still reporting errors? > If I could find a way to get it running I could re-install the packages > (there's 1.5GB of debs in the archive). An alternative, if I could find > a way to extract a list of installed packages, would be to re-install > from scratch. If KNOPPIX can't chroot into the system then I don't have hope that the system would be able to boot. I would drive on it from KNOPPIX and try to get the filesystems into a clean state, or at least into a good enough state to be able to extract information from it. I am really worried that your cross-update from Ubuntu to Debian will be a continuing source of problems. Bob -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
