I have been running an old Dell Optiflex GX110 (with original 512 Meg
of memory) as a backup system for a year or more without any problems,
for some reason it rebooted itself last week and failed to restart.
OS is Debian Lenny with a 2.6.26 kernel. 80 gig hard drive with three
partitions / and /home (formatted ext3) plus swap
Eventually I found the the bios had reset the hard disk setting from
the original 80 gig to 10 Gig so grub wouldn't start.
When I corrected the bios setting it then booted ok BUT it runs
terribly slowly. I know it isn't a very fast system to start with but it
is currently taking 40+ minutes to get from the grub screen to a logon
prompt.
In fact I think it has timed out somewhere along the line and is
going nowhere in multi-user mode. Am going to reboot and run single
user mode.
One advantage of it being so slow is that I can read all the screen
messages that normally flash by and I have just noticed this:
hda: host side 80-wire cable detection failed, limiting max speed to
UDMA33
Could that be the problem?
I had earlier tried changing to another hard drive, also with Lenny
installed, but that made no difference. I tried installing Debian Sarge
on the second disk and it took 13 hours to get a basic system installed
to the point where I could logon.
I am currently trying to get memtest86 installed and running to see if
the memory is faulty, my first attempt didn't get memtest added to the
grub boot options so am going to manually edit /boot/grub/menu.lst if I
ever get to a logon prompt, (now 37 minutes since reboot).
Am going to go and have breakfast and maybe it will have done so by the
time I come back ;-)
Any suggestions as to what else could be at fault would be welcome. I
no longer have any stock of replacement bits and pieces, apart from
the second hard drive, as I had a clear out before we moved here so
cannot swap bits and pieces around.
It may be that this system has is passed its 'usability date' and
I'll need to get a replacement system but the only option locally is
to buy a brand new system from PC World which I am very reluctant to
do. All I need is to be able to clone (rsync) the /home partition on my
main system to a backup system.
--
John Lewis
using Debian sid
