Hi Mark thanks for the great advice I will try and perform these actions to-day( when I get to the college), all though I think I tried to run yast from the text prompt and when I choose software install it started to work but then just hang having said that I may not have been in init 3, is it possible to run yast from the installation cd I have the whole set( 7 cds) also the problem is that if I boot up using the installation cd (via boot system from disk) I can log into the KDE or text mode but cant run any software or commands such as top, telnet, ftp etc again I am extremely grateful for your kind help John Proctor. ps if I try to boot from HD it gets so far and hangs ( I think there is a few files missing)

From: "Mark A. Taff" <marktaff@comcast.net> To: suse-linux-e@suse.com Subject: Re: [SLE] Please Desparate Help to recover. Date: Sun, 20 Feb 2005 13:22:54 -0800

On Sunday 20 February 2005 13:12, Chris H wrote:

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Mark A. Taff wrote:

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On Sunday 20 February 2005 12:20, John Proctor wrote:

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I wonder if any body could please give me some advice, I have SuSE 8, and via the system disk I can boot up from the hard disk but when I try to go into Yast it just hangs,

Remember having a similar problem in the 8 series as well. One thing you can do is as follows:

1. Boot into the system in any manner you can and access the command line shell via cntrl-alt-F3 for example. 2. enter the root credentials and enter init 3 at the prompt, this will drop you into singel user mode with no X 3. If you have the install discs available, then enter yast at the command prompt and re-install all yast components 4. If you dont have the install discs available, set the installation source to a known ftp (remote) installation source and proceed with instruction (3) above. 5. Prior to leaving yast, run the update to get the latest updates to yast for your release. 6. Exist yast, and run SuSEconfig manually just to be sure. 7. enter init 5 and this will bring you back to your X session prompt. 8. test yast to see if it works for you. 9. if it fails, then just repost with the tail error log in line as text. The log can be found in /var/log/y2log and tail in a terminal as follows; $ tail /var/log/y2log $ ----> lots of output (copy to email via cut and paste)

This should get you working again however without the last items...:)

/ch Chris, You sent this to me, not to the list. ;-) John might find it more valuable on the list. -- Mark A. Taff << attach3 >>