Re: [gentoo-user] Boot situation

[Alan McKinnon <alan@linuxholdings.co.za>]

On Sunday 09 September 2007, Colleen Beamer wrote:
> Thanks Alan,
>
> Whew!  You gave me a lot to respond to and it will take a bit of time
> since I have to run between two computer.

:-)

[snip Media Direct stuff]

> Truthfully, I'm not sure what it does.  I have never had a computer
> with that button either and I don't have Windows on the laptop - I
> installed Gentoo right away.  All I know is that when I hit that
> button thinking that I had hit the power button and walked away, the
> splash screen with "Dell Media Direct" was displayed.

Google found this:

http://www.goodells.net/dellrestore/mediadirect.htm

So it's a mini-OS type of thing to play media. It hides itself and does 
other weird stuff so I'm not surprised it went ballistic on your 
partition table...

I'd advise you to go into the BIOS setup screen at the next boot and see 
if there's a way to switch it off or disable it

[snip steps taken to fix stuff]

All those steps look correct proper and fine with the expected results

[snip]

> > The output of e2fsck, run on each of your filesystems
>
> e2fsck for both sda1 (boot) and sda4 (home) come back clean
>
> Output from e2fsck for /dev/sda3 is:
>
> Pass
> 1	Checking inodes, blocks and sizes
> 2	Checking Directory Structure
> 3	Checking Directory connectivity
> 4	Checking Reference counts
> 5	Checking Summary information
>
> /dev/dsa3: 437650/4889248 files (4.3% non-contiguous) 2203865/9767520
> blocks

/me scratches head wondering what could it be...

You might have an incorrect kernel config, with the filesystem or disk 
drivers not compiled in anymore. Could you post the output of lspci, 
plus your config? Use 'zcat /proc/config > /path/to/some/file' and 
attach it so we are sure we have the right one

What version and USE flags are you using for grub?

MediaDirect *might* have done weird things to your BIOS setup, it's 
worth a try to make a note of all current settings, then reset 
everything to default and try once more. Long shot, but I've seen 
stranger things...

> Anyway, let me know what else you need (besides maybe contents of
> fstab and grub.conf
>
> Although the fstab and grub.conf are exactly what they were before
> hitting that damned "Media Direct" button.

If they are the same then there's no real need to go further down that 
route. For the record, your boot stanza will have minimally something 
like this:

root   (hd0,0)
kernel /vmlinuz ro root=/dev/sda3 console=/dev/tty1 


alan


-- 
Optimists say the glass is half full,
Pessimists say the glass is half empty,
Developers say wtf is the glass twice as big as it needs to be?

Alan McKinnon
alan at linuxholdings dot co dot za
+27 82, double three seven, one nine three five
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