Hi

I hope you can help me. My situation is this:

After upgrading some packages (including kernel upgrade, I think) my
server does not boot.

The IDE activity LED does not blink a lot after I turn the power on,
and I cannot hear the disk head moving. So I am figuring that it fails
just after GRUB or something.

I do not have any monitor or a keyboard, so I cannot see exactly what
is happening, but I have taken the primary hard drive out and put it
in an USB enclosure, so that I can mount the root filesystem of the
server on my laptop.

I can then chroot into the filesystem and do stuff. I have tried
installing an older kernel image package. But this did not help.

Do you have any suggestions on how I can solve this problem and make
my server boot again?
Thanks.

Additional informaiton:
My hardware is a VIA mini-itx board with two 250GB ATA drives. The
primary master contains one large ext3 filesystem which is the root
filesystem. I boot from this.
The secondary master contains one large ext3 filesystem that is
encrypted using LUKS/cryptsetup. I use this for storage.

My /boot/grub/menu.lst is here:
http://thomasdamgaard.dk/p/P1050.html

When it failed booting it used the kernel version 2.6.18-5-486.

--
Med venlig hilsen/Kind regards
Thomas Damgaard Nielsen
http://thomasdamgaard.dk


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Hi

I hope you can help me. My situation is this:

After upgrading some packages (including kernel upgrade, I think) my
server does not boot.

The IDE activity LED does not blink a lot after I turn the power on,
and I cannot hear the disk head moving. So I am figuring that it fails
just after GRUB or something.

I do not have any monitor or a keyboard, so I cannot see exactly what
is happening, but I have taken the primary hard drive out and put it
in an USB enclosure, so that I can mount the root filesystem of the
server on my laptop.

I can then chroot into the filesystem and do stuff. I have tried
installing an older kernel image package. But this did not help.

Do you have any suggestions on how I can solve this problem and make
my server boot again?
Thanks.

Additional informaiton:
My hardware is a VIA mini-itx board with two 250GB ATA drives. The
primary master contains one large ext3 filesystem which is the root
filesystem. I boot from this.
The secondary master contains one large ext3 filesystem that is
encrypted using LUKS/cryptsetup. I use this for storage.

My /boot/grub/menu.lst is here:
http://thomasdamgaard.dk/p/P1050.html

When it failed booting it used the kernel version 2.6.18-5-486.


--
Med venlig hilsen/Kind regards
Thomas Damgaard Nielsen
http://thomasdamgaard.dk


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On Fri, 18 Jan 2008 22:51:13 +0100
"Thomas Damgaard" <thomasdn@gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi
>
> I hope you can help me. My situation is this:
>
> After upgrading some packages (including kernel upgrade, I think) my
> server does not boot.
>
> The IDE activity LED does not blink a lot after I turn the power on,
> and I cannot hear the disk head moving. So I am figuring that it fails
> just after GRUB or something.
>
> I do not have any monitor or a keyboard, so I cannot see exactly what
> is happening, but I have taken the primary hard drive out and put it
> in an USB enclosure, so that I can mount the root filesystem of the
> server on my laptop.
>
> I can then chroot into the filesystem and do stuff. I have tried
> installing an older kernel image package. But this did not help.
>
> Do you have any suggestions on how I can solve this problem and make
> my server boot again?
> Thanks.
>
> Additional informaiton:
> My hardware is a VIA mini-itx board with two 250GB ATA drives. The
> primary master contains one large ext3 filesystem which is the root
> filesystem. I boot from this.
> The secondary master contains one large ext3 filesystem that is
> encrypted using LUKS/cryptsetup. I use this for storage.
>
> My /boot/grub/menu.lst is here:
> http://thomasdamgaard.dk/p/P1050.html
>
> When it failed booting it used the kernel version 2.6.18-5-486.
>
>
> --
> Med venlig hilsen/Kind regards
> Thomas Damgaard Nielsen
> http://thomasdamgaard.dk
>

Hi Thomas.

I don't think you have had a kernel upgrade, because if you had, grub
would have added both kernels to your boot menu because of the option:

# howmany=all

You would have seen both kernel 2.6.18-4-486 and 2.6.18-5-486 in the
boot menu, but you don't.

Since you are able to mount the drive on your laptop try taking a look
in the different logs to see if you can find any useful information.

---
Med venlig hilsen/Best regards

Kim N. Lesmer
Programmer and systemadministrator
Programmør og systemadministrator

Web : www.bitflop.com
E-mail : knl@bitflop.com

Quoth Thomas Damgaard:
> The IDE activity LED does not blink a lot after I turn the power on,
> and I cannot hear the disk head moving. So I am figuring that it fails
> just after GRUB or something.

GRUB would actually want to read from the disk. After initial BIOS
bootstrapping, the master boot sector of your HD is read - usually, there'd be a
bootloader for GRUB, which then mounts the filesystem it knows (was pointed to
by the original install) and then boots the real bootloader (what you can see on
the screen) because the MBR is usually waaay to small to hold modern
bootloaders. All this involves quite a bit of disk activity.
>
> I do not have any monitor or a keyboard, so I cannot see exactly what
> is happening, but I have taken the primary hard drive out and put it
> in an USB enclosure, so that I can mount the root filesystem of the
> server on my laptop.

That doesn't really make your life easier. I think a monitor (at the very least)
would be a nice idea...

> I can then chroot into the filesystem and do stuff. I have tried
> installing an older kernel image package. But this did not help.

Did you try to re-install GRUB? If you say that it doesn't read from the HD, I
think it's unable to read the/a boot loader - so you might try reinstalling.

> My /boot/grub/menu.lst is here:
> http://thomasdamgaard.dk/p/P1050.html

looks fine to me. But maybe the MBR isn't set up properly...

Aleks

El Viernes, 18 de Enero de 2008, Thomas Damgaard escribió:
> Hi
>
> I hope you can help me. My situation is this:
>
> After upgrading some packages (including kernel upgrade, I think) my
> server does not boot.
>
> The IDE activity LED does not blink a lot after I turn the power on,
> and I cannot hear the disk head moving. So I am figuring that it fails
> just after GRUB or something.
>
> I do not have any monitor or a keyboard, so I cannot see exactly what
> is happening, but I have taken the primary hard drive out and put it
> in an USB enclosure, so that I can mount the root filesystem of the
> server on my laptop.
>
> I can then chroot into the filesystem and do stuff. I have tried
> installing an older kernel image package. But this did not help.
>
> Do you have any suggestions on how I can solve this problem and make
> my server boot again?
> Thanks.
>
> Additional informaiton:
> My hardware is a VIA mini-itx board with two 250GB ATA drives. The
> primary master contains one large ext3 filesystem which is the root
> filesystem. I boot from this.
> The secondary master contains one large ext3 filesystem that is
> encrypted using LUKS/cryptsetup. I use this for storage.
>
> My /boot/grub/menu.lst is here:
> http://thomasdamgaard.dk/p/P1050.html
>
> When it failed booting it used the kernel version 2.6.18-5-486.

This is not really a kde problem, but I'll try to give some pointers.

First of all I would change the root parameter in the boot command line for
the real device, for example root=/dev/sda1, most probably in your case.

Change both boot lines and use the second which probably could give you more
detailed information.

If this fails I would try to boot a debian-installer cd and install kernel
again. Maybe it's a disk driver problem, but it's strange that you don't have
any text, that would point to some video misconfiguration options.

Regards,
--
Raúl Sánchez Siles
----->Proud Debian user<-----
Linux registered user #416098

Sorry. I accidentally sent the e-mail to the kde list. It should have
been sent to the user list.


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On Fri, Jan 18, 2008 at 10:51:13PM +0100, Thomas Damgaard wrote:

> I do not have any monitor or a keyboard, so I cannot see exactly what
> is happening, but I have taken the primary hard drive out and put it
> in an USB enclosure, so that I can mount the root filesystem of the
> server on my laptop.

Why not just hook up a serial cable between the two and use the laptop
as a serial console for the server. Log the output and see what's up.

Doug.


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On Jan 18, 2008 11:25 PM, �лек�андър Л. Димитров <aleks_d@gmx.de> wrote:
> Quoth Thomas Damgaard:
> > The IDE activity LED does not blink a lot after I turn the power on,
> > and I cannot hear the disk head moving. So I am figuring that it fails
> > just after GRUB or something.
>
> GRUB would actually want to read from the disk. After initial BIOS
> bootstrapping, the master boot sector of your HD is read - usually, there'd be a
> bootloader for GRUB, which then mounts the filesystem it knows (was pointed to
> by the original install) and then boots the real bootloader (what you can see on
> the screen) because the MBR is usually waaay to small to hold modern
> bootloaders. All this involves quite a bit of disk activity.

Yeah. I know that GRUB reads from the disk, but not at all as much as
when the server boots successfully.
There is some IDE activity in the beginning, but not very much.


> > I do not have any monitor or a keyboard, so I cannot see exactly what
> > is happening, but I have taken the primary hard drive out and put it
> > in an USB enclosure, so that I can mount the root filesystem of the
> > server on my laptop.
>
> That doesn't really make your life easier. I think a monitor (at the very least)
> would be a nice idea...

Ok. I do not have a monitor or a keyboard at the moment.


> > I can then chroot into the filesystem and do stuff. I have tried
> > installing an older kernel image package. But this did not help.
>
> Did you try to re-install GRUB? If you say that it doesn't read from the HD, I
> think it's unable to read the/a boot loader - so you might try reinstalling.

Ok. Shouldn't I be able to do this from the root filesystem mounted
via USB and then chroot into it and run update-grub?
This I already tried.


> > My /boot/grub/menu.lst is here:
> > http://thomasdamgaard.dk/p/P1050.html
>
> looks fine to me. But maybe the MBR isn't set up properly...

How do I set that up properly?

--
Med venlig hilsen/Kind regards
Thomas Damgaard Nielsen
http://thomasdamgaard.dk

On Jan 19, 2008 5:14 AM, Douglas A. Tutty <dtutty@porchlight.ca> wrote:
> On Fri, Jan 18, 2008 at 10:51:13PM +0100, Thomas Damgaard wrote:
>
> > I do not have any monitor or a keyboard, so I cannot see exactly what
> > is happening, but I have taken the primary hard drive out and put it
> > in an USB enclosure, so that I can mount the root filesystem of the
> > server on my laptop.
>
> Why not just hook up a serial cable between the two and use the laptop
> as a serial console for the server. Log the output and see what's up.
>

I do not own a serial cable and I don't think that my Thinkpad T42 has
a serial port.


--
Med venlig hilsen/Kind regards
Thomas Damgaard Nielsen
http://thomasdamgaard.dk


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On Sun, Jan 20, 2008 at 10:54:59AM +0100, Thomas Damgaard wrote:
> On Jan 19, 2008 5:14 AM, Douglas A. Tutty <dtutty@porchlight.ca> wrote:
> > On Fri, Jan 18, 2008 at 10:51:13PM +0100, Thomas Damgaard wrote:
> >
> > > I do not have any monitor or a keyboard, so I cannot see exactly what
> > > is happening, but I have taken the primary hard drive out and put it
> > > in an USB enclosure, so that I can mount the root filesystem of the
> > > server on my laptop.
> >
> > Why not just hook up a serial cable between the two and use the laptop
> > as a serial console for the server. Log the output and see what's up.
> >
>
> I do not own a serial cable and I don't think that my Thinkpad T42 has
> a serial port.
>

Not having a backup-plan for getting console access (e.g. either a
monitor/keyboard or a serial cable and a USB/serial dongle) ranks up
there with not having a data backup.

At least you can build a serial cable and USB dongles aren't very
expensive.

Does the laptop have a modem? Does the server? Dial in.

Doug.


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