From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Received: from lists.gentoo.org ([140.105.134.102] helo=robin.gentoo.org) by nuthatch.gentoo.org with esmtp (Exim 4.62) (envelope-from ) id 1H6rtR-0006gp-Ba for garchives@archives.gentoo.org; Tue, 16 Jan 2007 17:14:41 +0000 Received: from robin.gentoo.org (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by robin.gentoo.org (8.13.8/8.13.8) with SMTP id l0GHCnuV012818; Tue, 16 Jan 2007 17:12:49 GMT Received: from smtp.nildram.co.uk (smtp.nildram.co.uk [195.149.33.74]) by robin.gentoo.org (8.13.8/8.13.8) with ESMTP id l0GHCmGD016485 for ; Tue, 16 Jan 2007 17:12:48 GMT Received: from wstn.prhnet (prh.gotadsl.co.uk [81.6.251.123]) by smtp.nildram.co.uk (Postfix) with ESMTP id D588654B7D; Tue, 16 Jan 2007 17:12:42 +0000 (GMT) From: Peter Humphrey To: gentoo-amd64@lists.gentoo.org Subject: [gentoo-amd64] What went wrong Date: Tue, 16 Jan 2007 17:12:44 +0000 User-Agent: KMail/1.9.5 Precedence: bulk List-Post: List-Help: List-Unsubscribe: List-Subscribe: List-Id: Gentoo Linux mail X-BeenThere: gentoo-amd64@gentoo.org Reply-to: gentoo-amd64@lists.gentoo.org MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Disposition: inline Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Message-Id: <200701161712.44900.prh@gotadsl.co.uk> X-Archives-Salt: be155e23-f282-4912-8a44-65287d0cb093 X-Archives-Hash: 7748e8d9e7d637b1d9ce66a71bf0d95d Well, there's a tale and no mistake. Early December, it was, when I started getting refusal to boot. Even the POST wouldn't run until I took out half the RAM. Then, while switching sticks about to find where the problem was, in my clumsiness I managed to break one of the DIMM slots. Looked like I had to change the motherboard, but I wanted advice from the system builder, Armari, so I packed the box up and sent it off. The news was not good, so as the system was three years old by then, I decided to cut my losses and have the motherboard replaced. Oh, and by the way, said Darryll, did I know that one of my SATA disks was about to fail? I didn't, no. Just disconnect it, I said, and I'll see what I can get off it when it comes home. Eight months old - I ask you! The box came back on the 23rd after quite a wait for SuperMicro to get a board out to Armari. I spent spare time over Christmas trying to get a system working, and I started an mdraid thread here on 28 December. Thanks for the suggestions, those who tried to help. Problems continued to haunt me. I couldn't boot a floppy with Smart Boot Manager on it, nor any other for that matter; I couldn't find a way to mount the newly rebuilt md partitions other than from the installation disk; and I kept getting mysterious oddities all over the place. Eventually the penny dropped, and I disconnected the allegedly imminently failing SATA disk. I'd already disabled it in the BIOS, but that left the electrical connections in place, of course, and I've a nasty feeling that stray pulses were getting out of the disk and into places they shouldn't. So I pulled both plugs: power and signal, since when the system has seemed more stable. So, one disk down and no RAID. No problem - just delete the type-fd partitions off the remaining disk, create new Reiser file-systems and restore the backup; then worry about what to do about the possibility of the disk failure's having damaged the configuration. Well, as we all build from source hereabouts, and the source files are protected with checksums, all I had to do, I reasoned, was to emerge -e system and then world. Heigh-ho. After going through etc-update carefully and making sure I hadn't thrown out any of my settings, I now find a few little quirks. I really don't want to have install again from scratch, as distinct from recovering backups (my wife is patient - of course - but I'm sure she doesn't quite understand how running a computer can possibly take up so much time), but I can't be confident in the system as it is. Kdm won't start, vmware-server locks the machine solid, and one or two other things aren't quite right, such as Smart Boot Manager not booting. To cap it all, today both the on-board Ethernet ports stopped working and I had to slot in a spare PCI card. We do do all this sort of thing for fun, don't we? -- Rgds Peter -- gentoo-amd64@gentoo.org mailing list