Dear all,
After having had an extremely stable system for a while now (MDK 9.0), I stupidly played around with the BIOS' power management features, and the system locked. So I had to hard reboot, and changed them back to what they were, thinking all would be fine...
They system locked up again, with kernel error messages that were pretty cryptic (only hex numbers).
My system is configured with several RAID5 partitions and a RAID0 partition. I booted with the failsafe kernel, and went into maintenance mode.
Surely enough, checking /proc/mdstat, the RAID arrays were rebuilding themselves. Sounded good. Once they finished I unmounted them and did an xfs_check on each partition (except / and /usr) and no errors were found. I tried the restore booting from the installation CDs, but surely enough, because of the RAID setup etc, the partitions couldn't be found.
Anyways, so I reboot again, and this time, it seems to be loading, and o-oh, what do I get? KDM with all "users icons" appearing in the box, and no background image (black screen). I thought this would be simple to fix so I proceed to try logging in.
The system crashed I believe, so I did the above mentioned steps again. Next time, instead of trying to log into KDM, I went to one of the virtual consoles, and started GDM on another screet (:1 instead of :0). BTW, GDM is very nice. So I start KDE (for the first time for that user), and I get several siggfaults(?) and errors, but eventually the sytem starts up. There had been some error messages with the font server, so I thought that running the Xserver configuration tool would fix that. Another error I got was that .devfsd couldn't be found.
I restart the Xserver on :0, and then I reconfigure KDM to only show the users I wanted to see, and chose the background. Surely enough the users displayed were changed, but no background yet... So I restart machine to see if everything is fine. This time .devfsd was mounted so that was ok, no error with X font server, so that seemed ok, but KDM has still no background. I try to log in, and I get the X window, with a smaller console window in the top left. Surely enough I can still log into GDM on :1 .
My data seems to be all there... for safety I did another backup of the essential files (/etc and all my docs). When I was trying to archive the files, the console window was crashing... but eventually it worked.
I had a few more lockups, and complaints about the scsi device not finding the block size or something (I assumed it was the CDR drive)
I don't know what happened. fstab and mtab are fine, mdstat shows no problems, I have tons of data and although the most important stuff is backed up, lots would be lost. Because everything is in RAID configuration, I don't know if I can do the usual Mandrake Upgrade install trick would work.
What I did to be able to post to the list was to change the /etc/sysconfig/desktop file to start GDM instead, and pop two random data CDs into the CD and CDR drives. Now I can log-in to the machine, and this time there was no error at all (everything seems fine). I don't know if KDM works or not, and I don't know if KDE works or not (GNOME is my default).
And most importantly, I don't know how bad the sytem was affected, or how reliable it is.
I am in the middle of final exams, so this is really not the right time for this to happen... but hey, it's Moore's law isn't it?
I'd really appreciate your advice, what shall I do to ensure the system works, and to fix whatever might be wrong?
gikoreno
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