john lewis wrote: > I have been running an old Dell Optiflex GX110 (with original 512 Meg > of memory) as a backup system for a year or more without any problems, > for some reason it rebooted itself last week and failed to restart. > > OS is Debian Lenny with a 2.6.26 kernel. 80 gig hard drive with three > partitions / and /home (formatted ext3) plus swap > > Eventually I found the the bios had reset the hard disk setting from > the original 80 gig to 10 Gig so grub wouldn't start.
If BIOS settings are changing randomly on an old PC, I would immediately suspect that the CMOS battery is flat. > > When I corrected the bios setting it then booted ok BUT it runs > terribly slowly. I know it isn't a very fast system to start with but it > is currently taking 40+ minutes to get from the grub screen to a logon > prompt. Perhaps the hard drive is failing too. > > In fact I think it has timed out somewhere along the line and is > going nowhere in multi-user mode. Am going to reboot and run single > user mode. > > One advantage of it being so slow is that I can read all the screen > messages that normally flash by and I have just noticed this: > > hda: host side 80-wire cable detection failed, limiting max speed to > UDMA33 Does it have an 80-wire cable? Have you tried reseating the drive cable? > > Could that be the problem? > > I had earlier tried changing to another hard drive, also with Lenny > installed, but that made no difference. I tried installing Debian Sarge > on the second disk and it took 13 hours to get a basic system installed > to the point where I could logon. > > I am currently trying to get memtest86 installed and running to see if > the memory is faulty, my first attempt didn't get memtest added to the > grub boot options so am going to manually edit /boot/grub/menu.lst if I > ever get to a logon prompt, (now 37 minutes since reboot). > > Am going to go and have breakfast and maybe it will have done so by the > time I come back ;-) > > Any suggestions as to what else could be at fault would be welcome. I > no longer have any stock of replacement bits and pieces, apart from > the second hard drive, as I had a clear out before we moved here so > cannot swap bits and pieces around. > > It may be that this system has is passed its 'usability date' and > I'll need to get a replacement system but the only option locally is > to buy a brand new system from PC World which I am very reluctant to > do. All I need is to be able to clone (rsync) the /home partition on my > main system to a backup system. How about just using an external USB hard drive for that? cheers Chris -- Chris Dennis cgden...@btinternet.com Fordingbridge, Hampshire, UK -- Please post to: Hampshire@mailman.lug.org.uk Web Interface: https://mailman.lug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/hampshire LUG URL: http://www.hantslug.org.uk --------------------------------------------------------------
