chinbo99
May 21st, 2009, 03:48 PM
Hi all,
Not sure if anyone can help me with this as it quite complicated.
Basically this is what happened. I have Ubuntu 8.10 Server installed on an old IBM Pentium 4 system and it has been working fine for some time. I earlier shutdown the server (the proper way using the shutdown command and no errors were reported) and installed a second hard drive to just use as more storage alongside the server system on the primary drive. I checked the jumper settings to set a master and slave drive, and the bios picked the primary and new drive up correctly. On reboot, I received a large list of faults, but the main worry was many "segmentation faults". The boot sequence then just stopped at "Starting kernel log daemon".
So I had to reboot again and tried the recovery mode from the GRUB bootloader. I wasn't able to get a command prompt, as for some reason Ubuntu has forgotten the root password I set up??!?! So I tried the "dpkg - repair broken packages option". It searched around for a bit and came back with some available kernel updates and restricted modules packages, and some other packages to fix the broken packages problem. I let it download these and try to install them, but once again I got dpkg errors for these packages and they weren't installed properly. When I then rebooted again, the GRUB bootloader had lost all kernel options from its menu, leaving the only option as a memtest!!
I tried the repair broken system option on the original CD, and have looked at the disk with the shell option, and it appears the kernel files are still all there. I then tried to re-install the GRUB, and it failed, which the caused problems with the shell option!! So I am now unable to get a shell command prompt from the CD, and I have no kernels listed in the bootloader so I think I'm pretty stuffed.
Can anyone give me any advice as to where I can go from here. Stupidly, being relatively new to linux, I don't have any backups of anything. I have quite a lot of stuff running on the machine that has taken me some time to setup, and I could really do with not having to give up and start again. Is there any way I can get a working kernel re-installed, or if nothing else, get access to the disk to get all my config files off of it, so at least I won't have to start completely from scratch if I'm forced to start again?
I know that description is pretty washy, but without having access to any logs, I can't really be any more specific as I can't remember the exact fault descriptions, codes etc.
Any help would be much appreciated!
Chinbo99
Not sure if anyone can help me with this as it quite complicated.
Basically this is what happened. I have Ubuntu 8.10 Server installed on an old IBM Pentium 4 system and it has been working fine for some time. I earlier shutdown the server (the proper way using the shutdown command and no errors were reported) and installed a second hard drive to just use as more storage alongside the server system on the primary drive. I checked the jumper settings to set a master and slave drive, and the bios picked the primary and new drive up correctly. On reboot, I received a large list of faults, but the main worry was many "segmentation faults". The boot sequence then just stopped at "Starting kernel log daemon".
So I had to reboot again and tried the recovery mode from the GRUB bootloader. I wasn't able to get a command prompt, as for some reason Ubuntu has forgotten the root password I set up??!?! So I tried the "dpkg - repair broken packages option". It searched around for a bit and came back with some available kernel updates and restricted modules packages, and some other packages to fix the broken packages problem. I let it download these and try to install them, but once again I got dpkg errors for these packages and they weren't installed properly. When I then rebooted again, the GRUB bootloader had lost all kernel options from its menu, leaving the only option as a memtest!!
I tried the repair broken system option on the original CD, and have looked at the disk with the shell option, and it appears the kernel files are still all there. I then tried to re-install the GRUB, and it failed, which the caused problems with the shell option!! So I am now unable to get a shell command prompt from the CD, and I have no kernels listed in the bootloader so I think I'm pretty stuffed.
Can anyone give me any advice as to where I can go from here. Stupidly, being relatively new to linux, I don't have any backups of anything. I have quite a lot of stuff running on the machine that has taken me some time to setup, and I could really do with not having to give up and start again. Is there any way I can get a working kernel re-installed, or if nothing else, get access to the disk to get all my config files off of it, so at least I won't have to start completely from scratch if I'm forced to start again?
I know that description is pretty washy, but without having access to any logs, I can't really be any more specific as I can't remember the exact fault descriptions, codes etc.
Any help would be much appreciated!
Chinbo99