On Thursday 03 January 2002 2:04 pm, Simon R Tod wrote: > Having used the rescue and then the root floopy I can get to the > installation menu. The partition list is given as > > Device Mounted on Type > > /dev/hda1 Not mounted Linux native > 2 Not in use Linux swap > 3 Not available HPFS / NTFS > 4 Not mounted Linux native > > Why the Linux swap is not in use, I don't know. hda3 is Window. Running > 'e2fsck /dev/hda1' from the shell prompt I get the message
None of these filesystems would be in use, simply because the resuce disk isn't using them. > > /dev/hda1 was not cleanly unmounted, check forced. > Pass 1: Checking inodes, blocks and sizes > Error reading block 8 (Attempt to read block from filesystem resulted in > short read) while doing the inode scan. Ignore error<y>? I've never seen this error before, I guess that it is a "bad block", i.e. a bad bit of the disk which can't be read. In general, I think errors with e2fsck can all be safely answered 'yes', but I normally use fsck and I'm not sure what the relationship is between the two programs (I think fsck simply calls e2fsck anyway) > Presumably if I return to the installation menu and select 'Mount a > Previously-Initialized Partition' for hda1 and hda4 everything should be > alright, and I should be able to boot from hda1. How do I deal with the > error message above, and any others that it might find. Presumably I > need to do the same check on hda4 as well. I don't think this will do anything, unless you are planning on reinstalling your system from scratch :-) I might be wrong (been a while since I installed debian) but this sounds like how you go about telling the installation where you want it to put things. Since you know that you have another native linux partition on your drive, it's quite possible that you was simply specifying the wrong one on the rescue disk. It's fairly standard practice to put a 'small' /boot partition first on the drive to make sure that lilo can find the kernel on bootup. So, the first thing that I would do would be to try the other one and see if that works. E.g. : rescue root=/dev/hda4 and see if that works. You could try mounting the partitions somewhere in the rescue root file system (if that makes sense). E.g mkdir /m nt/hda1 mount -t ext2 /dev/hda1 /mnt/hda1 mkdir /mnt/hda4 mount -t ext2 /dev/hda4 /mnt/hda4 This is always useful if you have messed your system up and need to set some files up. In your case, it would be useful as it will let you mess around with lilo and get it working again. When you know which of these is your root directory, you will have to tell the system that it is your root partition. (This is only temporary - simply typing 'exit' will return you to your normal root partition, in this case the rescue disk's) Assuming hda1 is your root partition : chroot /mnt/hda1 Now you should be able to use any software that is normally running on your system, though I suggest that finishing the kernel upgrade and running lilo, or reverting to the previous kernel and running lilo are probably your best options :-) Jason Wood
