Guest Enoon Posted September 17, 2005 Report Share Posted September 17, 2005 I'm not quite sure what happened to my computer, it was running fine yesterday... a friend changed a few things like adding noapic to the boot configuration and auto login. maybe other things as well. I don't know, I was at work... args (and neither him nor me has any idea what we're doing) this morning I start windows to see if it works. Everything seems fine, I reboot start Linux...nothing happens- no boot. I reboot, I kill the power, reboot again... nothing. I try the failsafe mode, because I can actually see what's happening there and it sais: "can't find ext2 on dev/sda7 ... Kernel Panic not syncing ...." something about the init and try adding init=option not that I'd know what option to pass, but unfortunately I can't type anything in anyway. after that it does nothing. I reboot again, try switching my mouse and keyboard back to ps2 because during installation he had trouble with usb and the hd... still nothing worked. is there something I can type in with lilo that will make him boot up properly? help please, I don't want to be stuck with windows again!!! thanks in advance Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
devries Posted September 17, 2005 Report Share Posted September 17, 2005 Try reinstalling lilo. Boot from CD1 (mandriva install cd), hit F1 at the splash and type: 'rescue'. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Enoon Posted September 17, 2005 Report Share Posted September 17, 2005 hm, I checked lilo.conf with the rescue disk and found that instead of trying to find my root on the sda6 where it's located it was looking for it on sda7, which has nothing to do with Linux at all. I reinstalled the bootlaoder, which found the rootpartition on sda6 but when I boot it still tries to boot from sda7. so I can't get into the system I don't know how to edit the lilo.conf using vi. I tried, but I don't know how to save it, or what exactly to change. at least now I'm getting some info though. it sais the superblock could not be read or does not contain a valid ext2 filesystem. of course not - that's because sda7 doesn't have linux installed. ext2 ist on sda6... I don't know how to tell him that... if you know how, please be detailed, I'm a complete noob, but I really want to get my system back running :/ Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
devries Posted September 17, 2005 Report Share Posted September 17, 2005 vi howto: open a file with: vi <name of file> Hit 'i' (for insert) to edit the text. Hit 'esc' (to exit insert mode) Type: ':x' to save and exit (yes :x and not just x :) ) Don't type the ' ' :) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
AussieJohn Posted September 17, 2005 Report Share Posted September 17, 2005 I have always used the :wq instead which means write and quit otherwise the changes you made may not be saved. Cheers. John. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
coverup Posted September 18, 2005 Report Share Posted September 18, 2005 And change the password for root access. It may seem to look like paranoya, but there is a good reason why superuser privileges are password protected - you now know why :P Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Enoon Posted September 18, 2005 Report Share Posted September 18, 2005 well, I tried fixing lilo manually and there several lines that contained the wrong partition, I changed it to sda6, but no luck. upon start up he boots a little bit then shows me a screan saying bad magic number on /dev/sda7 and that it does not contain a valid ext2. Well, no kidding... it's on sda6 ... He gives me the option to repair it manually, but I have no idea how, and I can't find sda7 mentioned in lilo anymore, so I don't know why upon booting he looks for the root partition there at all. would it help if I just reformatted the whole thing and reinstalled linux? Or is there another place where I need to change it from sda7 to sda6 besides the lilo.conf? there's another thing: when I boot via failsafe it stops booting after telling me disabling IRQ#10 ... I had this same probelm when I installed it and it wouldn't boot up. This got fixed by booting via -noapic. I've tried booting failsafe that way too, but it didn't work. Could this have something to do with it? what else should I be checking? oh and thanks for all the ideas ! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
devries Posted September 18, 2005 Report Share Posted September 18, 2005 Can you post your lilo.conf and /etc/fstab (search the board howto acces the linux partitions from windows) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Enoon Posted September 18, 2005 Report Share Posted September 18, 2005 Ok here goes: fstab, lilo.conf and the file lilo.conf.old I found as well... fstab: # This file is edited by fstab-sync - see 'man fstab-sync' for details /dev/sda7 / ext2 defaults 1 1 /dev/hda /mnt/cdrom iso9660 user,iocharset=iso8859-15,noauto,ro,exec 0 0 none /mnt/floppy supermount dev=/dev/fd0,fs=ext2:vfat,--,umask=0,iocharset=iso8859-15,sync,codepage=850 0 0 /dev/hdb5 /mnt/win_c vfat umask=0,iocharset=iso8859-15,codepage=850 0 0 /dev/sda1 /mnt/win_c2 ntfs umask=0,nls=iso8859-15,ro 0 0 /dev/hdb6 /mnt/win_d vfat umask=0,iocharset=iso8859-15,codepage=850 0 0 /dev/sda6 /mnt/win_d2 vfat umask=0,iocharset=iso8859-15,codepage=850 0 0 none /proc proc defaults 0 0 /dev/sda5 swap swap defaults 0 0 lilo.conf: default="linux" boot=/dev/sda map=/boot/map keytable=/boot/de-latin1.klt prompt nowarn timeout=100 message=/boot/message menu-scheme=wb:bw:wb:bw disk=/dev/sda bios=0x80 image=/boot/vmlinuz label="linux" root=/dev/sda6 initrd=/boot/initrd.img append="noapic resume=/dev/sda5 splash=silent acpi=ht" vga=794 read-only image=/boot/vmlinuz label="linux-nonfb" root=/dev/sda6 initrd=/boot/initrd.img append="noapic resume=/dev/sda5 acpi=ht" read-only image=/boot/vmlinuz label="failsafe" root=/dev/sda6 initrd=/boot/initrd.img append="failsafe acpi=ht resume=/dev/sda5 devfs=nomount" read-only other=/dev/sda1 label="windows" table=/dev/sda lilo.conf.old: default="linux" boot=/dev/sda map=/boot/map keytable=/boot/de-latin1.klt prompt nowarn timeout=100 message=/boot/message menu-scheme=wb:bw:wb:bw disk=/dev/sda bios=0x80 image=/boot/vmlinuz label="linux" root=/dev/sda7 initrd=/boot/initrd.img append="acpi=ht resume=/dev/sda5 splash=silent" vga=794 read-only image=/boot/vmlinuz label="linux-nonfb" root=/dev/sda7 initrd=/boot/initrd.img append="acpi=ht resume=/dev/sda5" read-only image=/boot/vmlinuz label="failsafe" root=/dev/sda7 initrd=/boot/initrd.img append="failsafe acpi=ht resume=/dev/sda5 devfs=nomount" read-only other=/dev/sda1 label="windows" table=/dev/sda I have a strange feeling about what I see, though I'm too uneducated to understand completely. it seems that my partitions were renamed to me, that the root partition actually was on sda7, but somehow the names got changed... could this have happened somehow?? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
devries Posted September 18, 2005 Report Share Posted September 18, 2005 /dev/sda6 /mnt/win_d2 vfat umask=0,iocharset=iso8859-15,codepage=850 0 0 As you can see sda6 is not a linux partition. /dev/sda7 / ext2 defaults 1 1 This is the linux / (root partition) so booting linux from sda7 is correct. However the default file system on Mandriva is ext3. Try changing ext2 to ext3. (tip: next time you install linux make a seperate /home partition) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Enoon Posted September 18, 2005 Report Share Posted September 18, 2005 I'm not so sure.... in rescue-gui when I do lsparts it find ext2 on sda6 and win_d2... on sda7. when I reinstall the bootlaoder it searches for my /root partition and finds it on sda6. could it be that the fstab has wrong information? Is there any way I can check this? also it's been ext2 from the start, maybe because I installed it to an existing partition... would you suggest I simply reinstall? would that eliminate the problem? and if so, how can I make sure this doesn't happen again by accident (aside from changeing the password...) I would really like to know how such a thing could happen, and how to avoid another such incident :/ Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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