[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: >> what is your boot manager? > > lilo > >> did its configuration get corrupted? > > Not as far as I know. But I'll try rerunning lilo from the sarge > system. Both etch and sarge have compatible lilo.conf files.
certainly wouldn't hurt... > >> or maybe >> you've got a bad block? > > Hope not. If so I'll have do discard the hard disk *fast*. yup. I recommend you boot a rescue cd and do a full fsck on the thing. maybe, as well, the partition table got corrupted and the kernel can't find the partition as a result. might check in to that as well. > >> I've seen this before on my system and can't >> remember what it was. >> >> does it hang there or drop you to busybox? > > It hangs, unresponsive. What's busybox? > its the minimal shell provided in the initrd that allows you to repair stuff if there is trouble booting. sometimes it comes up and can be very helpful. >>> >>> I am tempted to pronounce this etch installation dead and reinstall from >>> scratch. I'm also reluctant to do this, becase of Debian's reputation >>> as being the system that never needs to be reinstalled. Sarge, of >>> course, continues to soldier on without any problems at all (except for >>> application obsolescence -- but that's spec) >>> >>> Or should I do something radical to get current software, such as >>> installing gentoo on the former etch partition? >> ack! bite your tongue! ;-0 > > No... that hurts. > > The argument for having gentoo is that it really comes close to > the *latest* software, and is seems to be free of the version skews > imposed by package construction using different versions of, say, the C > and C++ run-times. On the other hand, installation and upgrading take > inordinately long, and I will no longer have the graceful handover from > testing to stable, after which the partition containing the former > stable system is upgraded to new testing. > > Oh yes, gentoo is reported to have some stability problems, which is > unlikely to be worse than what's happening to me with etch now. fair point. good luck' A -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
