On Monday 12 August 2002 22.03, Oliver Henshaw wrote:
My first question is whether there are any searchable forums or other resource that are appropriate for this type of problem. A good few hours have been wasted on google and around the suse/kde sites looking for information, but without much success.
Not sure what "this type of problem" really is. I suspect it has nothing directly to do with kde.
First off, lilo works fine. If I boot windows me (which has 30gig of the disk) it works fine and nothing seems to be wrong.
Have you done anything in WinME lately, like a defrag or similar harddisk maintenance?
"Could not read network connection list /home/henshaw/DCOP_server_linux_:0 Please check 'dcopserver' program is running"
before being returned to the login screen. If I try to login with 'failsafe', 'fvvm' or 'tvm' I'm returned straight back to the login screen. If I try to login with 'windowmaker' I do get somewhere, but if I try to launch any process (ie the xterm icon or anything from the suse application menu I can reach by right-clicking on a blank area of screen) then a message tells me that that process cannot be launched.
Can you log in in console mode? Especially twm is mildly surprising that it fails, since that is the most basic window manager there is, and if I'm not mistaken it is actually built into X. Do you get any interesting error messages in ~/.xsession-errors or /var/log/kdm.log or /var/log/XFree86.0.log or (perhaps most important) /var/log/messages
Booting first from the suse intallation disk and then "..from an existing partition" works and gives the same result.
Choosing the linux - safe settings option from LILO gives me stranger problems - the output as I'm loading:
(STUFF) SCSI subsystem driver Revision: 1.00 request_module[scsi_hostadaptor]: Root fs not found request_module[scsi_hostadaptor]: Root fs not found (MORE STUFF - 3-5 LINES) RAMDISK: Couldn't find valid RAM disk image starting at 0 Freeing initrd memory: 558k freed FAT: bogus logical sector size 0 FAT: bogus logical sector size 0 Kernel panic: VFS: Unable to write root fs on 03:07
Is this pasted or copied from memory? Are you sure it doesn't say "Unable to mount"?
(BLINKING CURSOR, NO RESPONSE TO INPUT)
Exploring a little with the installation disk, I can see that all the packages that should be installed are, and that I have 3 linux partitions (as I expected)
/hda5/ (no type) ~500mb - is the boot partition (I think)
A 500 meg boot? No, I suspect it's the root partition, although it's a little on the smallish side for a full installation. And yes, it should have a type
/hda6/ (swap) ~300mb - is swap /hda7/ (ext2) ~5gb - is my home directory
(These sizes I set manually, as the installer wanted to use a lot more space but linux can read from a windows partition so I thought it only fair to give WinMe the bigger slice - that arrangement has worked hitch free for over a year)
So what can i do to fix/further diagnose this problem. Ways to check the condition of the disk would be quite useful, and in particular the boot partition (LILO lives there, I think, but it should have a filesystem type shoulsn't it?) and to reach /home/henshaw/ so that I can try out something of the dcopserver problem.
LILO "lives" either on the Master Boot Record or on the boot record of one of the partitions. If you get the selection screen on bootup it's probably on the MBR. To diagnose the problem you could boot from the CD and select the rescue system. When you get to the login prompt, log in as root, you won't need a password. Then do something like this mkdir tmproot mount /dev/hda5 tmproot then (assuming it works) run "mount" without parameters, to see which file system you have on hda5. Unless you specified something else when you installed it should be reiserfs. Then "umount tmproot" and run the proper fsck for the filesystem. If it's reiser, run "reiserfsck /dev/hda5", if it's ext2, run "e2fsck /dev/hda5". Repeat for /dev/hda7.
Any ideas?
Could be a hardware problem caused by the move, could be that the Windows disk management tools has done something (it's happened before). regards Anders -- `When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, `it means just what I choose it to mean -- neither more nor less.'