silbar
April 29th, 2009, 10:14 PM
Greetings,
This is complicated and maybe only appears as interesting to certain experts in boot problems. I am running Hardy with Gnome on a Dell Inspiron. Because of something I must have done, I can no longer restart my machine into linux.
This is what I _think_ I did to make this happen:
After backing up my /home/silbar/ directory onto a Jaz drive, I also decided to update the copy on that drive of the /etc/ directory. First thing I did was move the old /etc/ into the trash on that Jaz disk. Unfortunately, that copy has since been empty from that trash.
As silbar (myself) I found I did not have permission to drag /etc/ onto the Jaz drive. So I 'sudo su'd to become root. I then typed, in the tty,
mv /etc /media/disk
Oops! This generated a whole lew of error messages. But it did copy (some?) things from /etc/ onto the Jaz disk, however as the contents of /etc/, not as a directory icon named 'etc'.
OK, to recover from that, I then sent the many /etc/ files and directories on the Jaz drive to (its) trash.
OK, a better way (I thought) was to make an archive of /etc/ (still as root at /):
tar -cf etc.tar etc
This worked, and I could move that etc.tar onto the Jaz drive without problem.
BUT, I now noticed that I no longer could connect to the net. There no longer seemed to be a DNS server the machine could access. This has happened to me before, and would be fixed with a restart. So, I told the machine to restart.
That's when I found it can't reboot (into linux -- I can still get, I supposed into Windows XP, but I haven't tried it). The reboot process stops somewhere along the way.
I can insert the Ubuntu 8.0.4 CD and boot up from it into a LiveCD session. (Did need to add the 'noapc' and 'nolapic' options to the boot-up line to do so).
The /home/ directory on the Dell is on a separate 50 GB partition (/media/disk-2) and the rest of / is on another 50 GB partition (/media/disk-3). So, I can compare the contents of the CD's /boot/ directory with that on /media/disk-3. They appear to be the same.
Similarly, a quick look at comparing the various /etc/rc* files in the two places shows that there are MANY differences.
OK, I am at a loss as to what to do next. Thanking you, anyone, in advance,
**** Silbar
This is complicated and maybe only appears as interesting to certain experts in boot problems. I am running Hardy with Gnome on a Dell Inspiron. Because of something I must have done, I can no longer restart my machine into linux.
This is what I _think_ I did to make this happen:
After backing up my /home/silbar/ directory onto a Jaz drive, I also decided to update the copy on that drive of the /etc/ directory. First thing I did was move the old /etc/ into the trash on that Jaz disk. Unfortunately, that copy has since been empty from that trash.
As silbar (myself) I found I did not have permission to drag /etc/ onto the Jaz drive. So I 'sudo su'd to become root. I then typed, in the tty,
mv /etc /media/disk
Oops! This generated a whole lew of error messages. But it did copy (some?) things from /etc/ onto the Jaz disk, however as the contents of /etc/, not as a directory icon named 'etc'.
OK, to recover from that, I then sent the many /etc/ files and directories on the Jaz drive to (its) trash.
OK, a better way (I thought) was to make an archive of /etc/ (still as root at /):
tar -cf etc.tar etc
This worked, and I could move that etc.tar onto the Jaz drive without problem.
BUT, I now noticed that I no longer could connect to the net. There no longer seemed to be a DNS server the machine could access. This has happened to me before, and would be fixed with a restart. So, I told the machine to restart.
That's when I found it can't reboot (into linux -- I can still get, I supposed into Windows XP, but I haven't tried it). The reboot process stops somewhere along the way.
I can insert the Ubuntu 8.0.4 CD and boot up from it into a LiveCD session. (Did need to add the 'noapc' and 'nolapic' options to the boot-up line to do so).
The /home/ directory on the Dell is on a separate 50 GB partition (/media/disk-2) and the rest of / is on another 50 GB partition (/media/disk-3). So, I can compare the contents of the CD's /boot/ directory with that on /media/disk-3. They appear to be the same.
Similarly, a quick look at comparing the various /etc/rc* files in the two places shows that there are MANY differences.
OK, I am at a loss as to what to do next. Thanking you, anyone, in advance,
**** Silbar