Am Freitag, 14. Dezember 2012, 11:18:21 schrieb fe...@crowfix.com: > Something went haywire with my 8 or 9 year old dual Opteron ~amd64 system > last night. I may have a bricked system. I haven't given up yet, but I > may have to buy a replacement system. I have external USB drive backups, > but the only other computer I have right now is an old Mac laptop which > can't read Linux LVM partitions. > > Questions: > > 1. I don't remember, and can't look up, the make.conf processor flags I > emerge with. But it is dual Opterons, and ~amd64. How compatible could > that be with modern Intel CPUs? I know Intel adopted the extra registers > of the AMD64 instruction set, but are there other differences which would > prevent an Opteron system from running as is under an Intel processor? > Maybe AMD still sells Opterons, and I will be stuck with building a system. > > 2. Is it feasible to buy some commodity box, like from Dell, with an > Intel processor, and plug in my two SATA SSD drives and get a console boot? > I don't give a fig right now about any GUI interface, and even Internet is > not the problem. If it will boot and run emerges, I can import the source > files for X and Ethernet and other peripherals via USB stick. But SATA > drivers ... > > 3. My kernels always have just about every driver compiled in as > modules, an old habit from when I used to swap in PCI cards like crazy. I > don't remember now how many SATA drivers are built in and how many are > modules; if the commodity box needs SATA drivers which aren't built in, > that could get tricky. Are there boot command line options to preload > certain modules? Might not do me any good. I think I could scrape by with > USB modules, but not SATA. > > For the curious, here is wat happened. When I left off last night, the USB > keyboard was only recognized when I unplugged all other USB devices, and > the system hung at the grub point, with a blank screen. > > A reboot failed because it couldn't find the root=/dev/sde drive. But > the USB keyboard was working because I used it in grub to select a new > 3.7.0 kernel (had been running 3.6.8). > > A second reboot ignored the USB keyboard and generated an ATA error I > had never seen before for every ATA drive and some I don't have, all the > way up to ATA13 before I rebooted it again. I haven't got it to boot even > this far since, so I can't regenerate that error. There was a 5 second or > so delay between these errors, making me think the ATAnn designator might > not be different drives, just retries. > > It booted a rescue DVD, but without the keyboard it was kind of > pointless, and it hung after showing two lines which I believe are > unrelated other than a place marker (generating xxx key, generating RSA > key). > > The keyboard wasn't even recognized by the BIOS. I finally disconnected > every USB device, all the ubs, and then the keyboard worked. > > But when I left it last night, it wouldn't even bring up the grub > screen. All the BIOS screens show the usual disk drives. > > The system was working perfectly fine before all hell broke loose. The > keyboard was recognized during grub the first time, but after that only if > all other USB devices were disconnected. The disk drives acted funny > during the boot, first with the unknown root- device error, then with the > funky ATA errors, and finally with not even bringing up grub. > > I will try some more desperate tricks today, like reconnecting the USB pile > to see if it at least boots the disks again - is my choice between disks > and keyboard? I will find out. My best guess right now is that booting > 3.7.0 is what clobbered things; whether I added a option which loaded bad > firmware, or 3.7.0 is broken, I have no idea. It could well be something > unrelated to 3.7.0. My goal for today is to try to get keyboard and disk > working, then boot with 3.6.8.
how about a more stable kernel - like 3.4.X? and yes, a confused bios can do a lot of strange things. One thing you might try: disconnect your box from the main for several minutes, reset bios... had to do that dance A LOT with a costly POS asus board... -- #163933
