A big mess now!

[Russell Coker]

On Fri, 27 Aug 2004 17:06, Scott Talbot <talbotscott at cox.net> wrote:
>  Well long story short is that my machine would not boot up. it got to
> the fsck then rebooted several times.  I figured it was time for a clean
> install.

What was the last thing on the screen before it rebooted?

If you edit the GRUB settings and remove "quiet" from the kernel command line 
then you will get more information.

Another possibility is installing a NULL modem cable (they can be purchased 
for $10 or less from any good electronics store) to capture messages to 
another computer.  A NULL modem cable can also be used for many other tasks 
so it's a good investment.

To do this you have to setup another computer with a serial comms program 
configured to 115200bps 8N1 (even a Windows program will do, so it doesn't 
matter if you don't have more than one Linux machine) and then edit the GRUB 
settings to include "console=ttyS0,115200" instead of "quiet".  Then when the 
kernel boots everything will go out the serial port for convenient capture.

-- 
http://www.coker.com.au/selinux/   My NSA Security Enhanced Linux packages
http://www.coker.com.au/bonnie++/  Bonnie++ hard drive benchmark
http://www.coker.com.au/postal/    Postal SMTP/POP benchmark
http://www.coker.com.au/~russell/  My home page