I apologise for the length of this email. I am flummoxed and don't know which bits matter the most. I have googled and binged until I can think of no more ways of framing the problem.
This m/c, having been running fairly continuously for the last couple of years (it has been switched off only to be moved larger distances, where larger sometimes means 11 miles but usually around 8000), suddenly wouldn't boot to the GUI on Saturday. (I don't know why it had been shutdown in the first place on that occasion.)
It has 2 HDDs, both I believe IDE, one of about 6GB, and one much larger - 250GB, 500GB??- and a DVD ROM drive.
Running openSUSE 11.0, with a Lucent wireless card.
On bootup, all is well until the login screen, and it gives up and after a blank screen comes back to a fairly long screen, in tiny, cramped print. I am a lousy typist, and have deteriorating eyesight, which between them make copying the screen difficult, so I hope I can be forgiven for typing only the bits that I think may be relevant.
First it seems to be listing results from various successful transactions, ending with:
<quote>
Loading required kernel modules done
Activating swap devices in /etc/fstab done
Adding 1052248k swap on /dev/sda2 Priority:-1 extents:1 across:1052248k failed
[snip] no message logging because /var file system is not accessible [snip]
fsck failed. Please repair manually and reboot.
</quote>
Attempting to boot into safe mode produces the same end result.
So - I tried to boot up with a Live CD to look at the file system. I tried another, and another and... All had problems detecting a video card. Only Puppy (4?) would boot eventually to a GUI, but only after it had asked me to agree to a generic video card, since it could not find a video card.
Neither version of Knoppix that I tried (6.0.1 CD and 5.1.1 CD) would boot to a GUI, but both would boot to a CLI. 5.1.1, which was slightly slower so that I could read the odd thing, complained that there were I/O problems with /dev/hdb. They did not, however, tell me which /dev/hdb was and I could not discover. Other Live CDs all produced variations on a theme, and all agreed that they couldn't find a video card.
The only drive acknowledged by the BIOS, and therefore the one from which it boots, is the 6GB one. Puppy calls that one sda1.
So: that is file system, video card, and I/O on one of the IDE drives.
I am stumped. Is it the motherboard? Pure old age? Gremlins?
There was an earlier error message, but I cannot recreate it and the piece of paper on which I had written it has been tidied out of existence by one of us. I googled that message and found several openSUSE users who had had the same error message, but could find no explanations or solutions.
All suggestions very gratefully received. "Bin it" had crossed my mind, but it seems a bit drastic.
Thanks.
Lisi
Lisi
