This is starting to get ridiculous...

[Guest greeneggs]

Hello

 

This is the second time this has happened and each time I've had to spend hours doing a complete reinstall.

 

I decided to download a few games (Freecraft, supertux, etc). I'm sitting there surfing the web, writing a letter, minding my own business when all of a sudden my HD begins cooking like crazy and everything gets really slow so I reboot. the first thing I notice when the little grey "reboot yes/no?" screen comes up is that it has a bunch of little black boxes going across it rather that the words "reboot yes/no?". So I reboot and end up with a command-line shell. No KDE desktop. Nothing. So, like I've been told before, I type my user name and PW in and then "startx". then I get a message that says the command is'nt recognized so I start typing other stuff in and reboot a 1/2 dozen more times, go into the safe mode, try the resue mode, updating from CD 1#...NOTHING. Now I am expecting to be told that I need to go in and change a bunch of lines in some files and add a bunch of complicated unix mumble jumble but the thing is that I am not a Linux guru and don't how how to do all that. I can't even get into Linux now to begin with and am presently on my Windows box. Like Windows, when I boot up, I expect to get a desktop rather than a command-line. Anyway, I'm pretty bumbed out right now and am about to dump Linux and just go back to my crappy Windows (even though I definately prefer Linux). At least I won't have these problems and with me going in for surgery soon, I have enough problems and worries already without this crap. Sorry, I'm just getting sick of this. I could sure use some help right now ::sigh::

 

Thank's

[Cannonfodder]

What do you mean by cooking?

 

What kind of file systems/partitions do you have..

 

After rebooting to console, do you have all your file systems mounted? Any missing? e.g. /usr there?

[Guest greeneggs]

What do you mean by cooking? 

 

What kind of file systems/partitions do you have..

 

After rebooting to console, do you have all your file systems mounted? Any missing? e.g. /usr there?

 

By "cooking", I mean the HD is spinning, working, making noises and doing the things HD's do when stuff is being loaded or unloaded in the background.

 

I have no idea what file systems or partitions I have any more than I know the 500th digit of PI or the hypotenuse of a triangle. All of this is alien to me :( . How would I find out?

 

I also don't know what's mounted/unmounted, etc because all I see is an ugly black screen. Yeah, I've heard people rant and rave about all the wonderful things you can do with that black screen but I personally don't like it and have a small sledge hammer sitting here handy in case it comes up again...ahhhh!!!

 

Sorry, it's been an incredibly miserable week :roll:

[bvc]

My second day of 9.1 the same thing happened. I learned my lesson about having a separate partition for /usr so this time I only have a /, swap, /home and when this happened it was only my bkup and download partition that wasn't mounted at mount point /var/ftp. Doing df -h revealed that it wasn't mounted.

 

I thought if you did an Upgrade (not packages only) that it goes through the diskdrake portion..no?

 

Does linux share this hd with windows? Would you be comfortable using parted? Saved my reiserfs /tmp once.

http://www.mandrakeusers.org/viewtopic.php...ighlight=parted

[Guest greeneggs]

My second day of 9.1 the same thing happened. I learned my lesson about having a separate partition for /usr so this time I only have a /, swap, /home and when this happened it was only my bkup and download partition that wasn't mounted at mount point /var/ftp. Doing df -h revealed that it wasn't mounted.

 

I thought if you did an Upgrade (not packages only) that it goes through the diskdrake portion..no?

 

Does linux share this hd with windows? Would you be comfortable using parted? Saved my reiserfs /tmp once.

http://www.mandrakeusers.org/viewtopic.php...ighlight=parted

 

Ok, to be honest with you BVC, I don't understand 9/10'ths of what you are talking about - even though I'm sure you are explaining it clearly. You see, I am used to a GUI with lots of pretty buttons and icons to click on. I am not all that accustomed to the command-line or doing things manually. I simply want it to work. For example, I would like to have you tell me that all I have to do is type "xyz" and this will solve my problem. Instead, it appears that I need to type in all sorts of complex stuff at the command-line level and this is something I know very little about.

 

No, Linux does not share this HD with Windows. I would rather not have it parted. Is there an easy way to do this?

 

Thank you

[qnr]

You say "so I Reboot" -- you don't indicate if you shut down properly, or hit the reset key, so I'm mentioning this:

 

One of the things you should always try to do is use SysReq to shut down gracefully.

 

if you are having problems, try this:

 

Hold down both the Alt and the SysReq (sometimes marked Print Screen) and while holding them, press these keys, individually, in this order:

 

R, S, E, I, U, B.

 

This will attempt to terminate all running programs, synchronize your hard disks and reboot.

[bvc]

Cool....can you boot to console mode>login> and do

 

df -h <hit Enter>

 

and tell us the result?

[Crashdamage]

Well, you don't give any details about any error messages you get during boot or anything so it's pretty hard to say what the problem might be. But it sounds like it may be a hardware problem, not a Linux problem. I've seen very similar things happen twice on Win machines. Once it was a slowly dying hard drive, the other was a bad IDE controller.

 

Patience will pay off with Linux. Like anything else with computers, it's not so tough after you get the basics. I thought Linux was pretty strange at first, had no idea what I was doing and like you sometimes got kinda frustrated. But now Windows is a constant frustration to me. People forget how much time and effort they had to put into learning the Windows way.

 

Suppose all you'd ever known was Linux - like imagine Linux was everywhere and Windows was the new kid on the block - Windows would really drive you crazy to learn. You'd be wondering...Why I can't just do a quickie edit to a file instead of hunting for some button hidden under 5 layers of GUI menus? Why do I have to constantly reboot for crashes, and rebooting for installs??? With Linux I didn't reboot for weeks or months...and what do you mean I gotta install printers, nic cards, sound card? - Mandrake set all that up for me...and why is there an A: drive and C: drive but never a B: drive? Why is Windows so stupid it doesn't even SEE a Reiser or ext3 partition? What's defrag, and why do I have to do it? Why didn't it TELL me when I installed one thing it would break another? - rpm did...Where's the man pages? I got something called the nimba virus and it trashed my ENTIRE friggin' hard drive!!! Now I gotta call Uncle Bill Gates and beg him to please, PLEASE gimme a code to reinstall XP...and then spend more money on frickin' anti-virus software so it doesn't happen again!! AAACCKK!!!

 

Yeah, Windows would be LOTSA fun...

 

 

Relax, you'll get it...nothing really worthwhile is easy.

[Guest ndeb]

Is this a hardware problem ? Is the hard-drive ok ?

[Steve Scrimpshire]

Some quickies:

 

At the terminal (as root):

 

To see what is mounted where:

 

df -a

 

To see what is supposed to be mounted where:

 

cat /etc/fstab

 

I've had a couple occasions where my harddrive started cooking and I had to reboot, but never caused any other problems and hasn't happened since I installed using reiserfs filesystem.

 

As a side note, by default there are a few tasks that Linux does at certain times of the day/night (usually at like 2 or 3 am, like

 

slocate -c -u

 

(That keeps your database up to date, so that when you want to locate a file, it can find it) and slocate can and will make your HD spin while it is searching and cause a slowdown if you don't have a lotta ram. I even noticed a slight slowdown when slocate was running when I had 128 MB of RAM.

[Guest greeneggs]

Ok, here's what I get when I type df -h...

 

FILE SYSTEM: SIZE: USED: AVAIL: USED: MOUNTED ON:

/dev/hda1------5.46----1.4G----3.8G-----27%-----/

/dev/hda6------3.46----25M-----3.3G-----4%------/home

 

 

As a side note, I had this same problem a few days ago and a number of people suggested it might be the RAM. I currently have 128M of RAM which is required by MDK to run in the graphical mode. Naturally, if one 64M strip of RAM failed, MDK would revert to the text mode and fail to boot up to KDE/GNOME. Make sense?. The other thing is, my computer was full of dustballs so the other day I took a vaccume cleaner and cleaned it up real good. While I was doing this I noticed a think coating of dust on one of the strips of RAM. I don't know, what do you guys/gals make of this?

[Crashdamage]

I didn't think about the slocate thing. He makes a good point there. It does spin the HD pretty good, and would also slow things down, especially if you have a bad chunk of menory and are down to 64MB. And Mandrake might still try to go to runlevel 5 (GUI).

 

At boot, does the bios report the correct amount of memnory?

[Guest greeneggs]

I just removed my RAM, cleaned it, cleaned the sockets, checked all connections and then logged into Windows to verify the RAM and discovered that I actually have 248M of RAM (not 128 as I previously said/thought). The problem (and I hate to say it) is definately MDK/Linux. The solution, I have absolutely no idea but I'm starting to feel like I'm dealing with an old car that's in the garage and up on blocks all the time and you spend 99% of the time just trying to keep it running. Akkk!!. Yeah, Windows sucks but at least it works. I have no idea what to do now and neither does anyone else apparently :roll:

 

Thank's just the same. Maybe I'll buy a MAC someday when I hit the lottery.

 

PS: I just ran a complete integrity check and I still get console (or whatever that black login screen is called).

[bvc]

What time of day was it when these 2 incidents happened? I'm leaning towards services running, because both times you said you rebooted. When this happened to me, and it did today for a second time though no damage occured, no ui would respond to a mouse click and the machine rebooted itself. Now this sounds like a hardware prob. Yours sounds like a service running. Next time it happens either open KDE System Guard and press the process table tab to see what's running, or open a terminal fullscreen and type

top <hit Enter>

to quit top press q

 

Or you could

ps -A <hit Enter>

 

ooops....look for

slocate

or

msec

to name a few....

 

Or install gps (my favorite graphical since the disapearance of gtop)

[Guest greeneggs]

So what do I do and how do I solve this problem in a simple, non-technical way?. I'd really prefer to continue using MDK but if I have to keep doing reinstalls and can't figure out how to get around this problem, what's the point?.

 

I realize that I probably sound ungreatful, rude, pushy, etc but please undestand that it has not been a good week (surgery, stress, MDK not booting, etc). I am not exactly a happy camper right now and yet I DO appreciate ANY help I can get regarding this matter as I am extremely anxious to put it behind me and get on with my life.

 

Thank you SO much!