Bernard wrote: > was fitted with MSWIN XP ; I repartitioned the HD to have a dual boot > (GRUB) with Debian Lenny and the original OS ; it worked very well in > such config for more than 2 years or so ; I had a mysql server on it, > with mysql databases.
Here you say Lenny. But then... > just waited indefinitely without doing nothing. Error messages appeared > after 4 or 5 long minutes of idling, they mostly said that /dev/sda3 did > not (no longer) exist, and that, perhaps, I should try /dev/hda3. I did And /dev/sda would be right for Lenny. In Lenny's 2.6.26 kernel all device names work under the scsi naming. But then you say /dev/hda and the hda names are the old kernel names. This leads me to believe that you are booting an older kernel. The previous Etch kernel used hd names. I think that is part of your problem. The first thing I would check is to see which kernels are available and which one you are booting. You can do this from the grub command line. I usually use TAB for filename completion expansion and use it like an ls command. (The new version of grub includes a real ls command but older ones did not.) Find out if you are booting the right kernel. If you find that you are not booting the right kernel then modify the grub boot on the fly as you have already been doing successfully to specify both the kernel and the associated initrd for it. If that works it should get you to a good booting system. But then you will need to report that problem and fix up any other modifications setting things back to hd* that you may have made such as /etc/fstab. Everything should use /dev/sd* names now. > discovered so far. For once, the CDROM drivers did not operate at all on > Debian environment ; under MSWIN one of the two drivers did operate ; If my guess is right about the kernel then that would explain this part not working too. > none of the two drives would boot a bootable CD (whatever settings in > the BIOS SETUP), so there is no way that I could possibly launch a > SystemRescueCD bootdisk. Hopefully you would be able to boot a rescue cdrom. The debian installer disk has a rescue mode. That can be very useful to repair a system such as yours. If the above grub selection of a newer kernel does not work then I recommend using the debian-install disk as a rescue disk. Bob
signature.asc
Description: Digital signature
