Something really odd happened this morning. My wife's mouse stopped working so I gave her mine (USB mouse). I hooked her mouse (USB) to my MDK laptop and booted. I got alot of errors (module - HID) on boot. To include the "cannot read ext3 file system, not supported by the kernel". It gave me alot of errors that I had invailid option in my fstab. Also gave me alot of invaild lines in my /etc/modules.conf file (alot).
At first I thought it might be a config file in /etc. Booted to my Gentoo partition, mount all my MDK partions and they mounted fine - no errors. The only thing I could see a was a blank XF86Config file. After checking a couple of files I decided that I really would not know for sure if a file was setup wrong. Thankfully I had a backup copy of my complete /etc directory that was about a week old. So I replaced the whole /etc directory so be safe. - Same big time errors on boot.
The only other thing I could think of was my kernel. I had a MDK boot disk so I tried it out. On boot it said that it had no ext3 support so I could not get into my /home directory. I did get into a working root desktop (no lan). This makes me believe some how that putting a "faulty" USB mouse messed up the kernel? Weird thing is the mouse would not work in Windows / MDK / Gentoo as a USB, but would work connected to a ps2 port with an adapter.
Some info:
/boot (ext2)
/ - reiserfs
/usr - reiserfs
/home- ext3
The "25mdk" kernel. (Sorry not at home.)
I have not deleted the partions yet so Im thinking of a chroot and recompile a kernel. But to be honest I have never gotten a MDK kernel to work yet. I have taken the source copied to my /home took the stock config file recompiled a loaded it to /boot. On boot to my new kernel I would get the neverending reboot., with nothing changed from the stock config. Ive got a gentoo kernel working many times. I had a generic 2.4 kernel to work with an unchanged MDK config. But no luck the the MDK sources.
Additonal note: on boot my laptop keyboard will not work until it boots to graphic mode. Unless I type "nousb" (but its a usb mouse) or tap on the keyboard during boot which does not work some times. Only way is to hard boot and try again. Would turning the computer down during a boot mess the kernel up?