user failures

[John Summerfield]

Gene Heskett wrote:
> Greetings;
> 
> I had my boot drives partition table zeroed out last night by something unk, 
> and then X froze.  


Coincidentally, I've just had a kubuntu system destroy itself. It was 
installed as 7.04, upgraded to 7.10.

Much to my astonishment, the system (cheap ASUS mobo, socket-A CPU, via 
chipset, generic) can suspend and hibernate, and power up on keypress.

As best I can figure it, this is the sequence of events.

I powered down, presumably using the new-found hibernate ability.

I booted, chose a XEN-capable kernel. It might have been a 7.04 kernel, 
I couldn't see one obviously for 7.10.

I shut down.

I booted, chose the latest (non-XEN) kernel.

It resumed!

I used it for a time.

I shut down.

I rebooted.

Now, we have a complicating factor: I use VGA=791, but with this kernel 
framebuffer does not work so I'm booting blind: nothing to see until X 
starts.

Anyway, Nothing visible happened for a long time.

I reset, then booted with VGA=6.

System booted for manual fsck.

I thought unkind thoughts about people who write fsck programs whose 
reports and messages are entirely incomprehensible to all but the 
highest of high priests, and ran
e2fsck -y /dev/hda6

There were lots and lots of messages about blocks being zeroed and/or 
freed and e2fsck restarting.

Eventually, it finshed and ^D lead to a reboot.

Later, I ran cfdisk to see what the partition table is, for reasons 
nothing to do with the above problems.

cfdisk declined to do anything, but fdisk is happy to have a look.

The partition table includes logs of hooley, with overlapping partitions 
and general mess.

"reinstall" comes to mind. Fortunately, hda7 seems okay. I've copied it 
to another drive.

I've looked around, everything seems to work, _but_ I don't see how or 
why I should trust it.

Fortunately, "reinstall" was close to the top of the agenda for this 
box, and the main question was "with what?"

Disk drive checks ok with smartctl and there are no errors logged to 
syslog.. Drive had about 345 power-on hours, shouldn't have expired yet.


Choices are SL5, C5 and (possibly) Debian.

Makes me wonder whether there might have been something unusual going on 
in your system,




-- 

Cheers
John

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