Hi, after updating my Debian box at work from 1.2 to 1.3 (with no problems) I accidently managed to lock as well my root as my user account.
To repair I got the newest 1.3 Rescue Disk (resq1440.bin) from my Debian mirror, rawrite2´ed it to a floppy, booted the system using the floppy, mounted my partitions, got a shell and did some repair. All went well :-) When I rebooted to linux I noticed several network error messages, and ping showed "Network is unreachable". Apparently the rescue disk had confused my WD8013 ethernet card. Then I booted do DOS -- and it complety hang after probing the ethernet card: "WD80x3 adress PROM contents are invalid". I did a hard reset, and, look, my ethernet card automagically awoke from paralyzation -- what the hell had happened? I remember that I had similar problems with two cheapo NE2000 clones after installing Debian the first time. One (Debian 1.1, Dec 96) came back to life after consulting the DOS configuration tool (grrr...). The second case (1.2, Apr 97) was more severe: the card refused even to answer to that DOS config tool. This card has changed its PROM state to a new IRQ (3) und IO (0x300). I managed to get it work again -- but that should not happen. Am I the only one with such an expirience? I should add that I never managed to get the standard kernel to work with my ethernet cards, and always had to built a custom kernel (which I prefer anyway). The hardware is in no way fancy: elderly 486 boards (with and without PCI) but quite sufficient under linux. No, this no flame against Debian. Debian has been proved to be a rock solid linux distribution for me -- and its upgradebilty is outstanding. But the initial hardware test seems to be offensive against the hardware under test -- and that should not be. KWS -- Mfg K.-W. Schulte -- O##O O##O O##O O##O ==The famous "Schwebebahn"====AA==suspension==AA=======AA===railway===AA==== Dr. Karl-Wilhelm Schulte AA AA AA AA Bergische Univ.-GH/HRZ ,__AA______________AA_______AA_____________AA___. Gaussstr. 20 | || || || |X| |X| || || || | D-42097 Wuppertal | || || || |X| |X| || || || | Tel 0202/4392807,Fax -2910 |_|| ||___________|| |X|_|X| ||___________|| ||_| [EMAIL PROTECTED] | | | | |X X| | | | | `==+=+=============+=+X===X+=+=============+=+==' -- TO UNSUBSCRIBE FROM THIS MAILING LIST: e-mail the word "unsubscribe" to [EMAIL PROTECTED] . Trouble? e-mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] .