At 18:10 02/03/00 -0500, you wrote:
>In my fiddling, I seem to have messed something up so that Mandrake
>7.0-2 will not boot. I don't know if it was fstab, inittab, or what.
>
>The boot process goes fine with all OK's until "Starting postfix", and
>that's where it hangs. When I Ctrl-Alt-Del, the shutdown and reboot
>process begins, and "Stopping at daemon" reports FAILED.
>
>I sure hope that suggests something to someone, other than that I have
>to erase everything and start over.
>
>Lane
>
>----
>Lane Lester / Madison County, Georgia USA
>----
>
Dear Lane,
It's very difficult to help you, if you don't even know what did you do
that resulted in yours being stuck.
I would suggest you to reinstall everyhing from scratch and that upon
installation you define four different partitions, in that order: /, /swap,
/usr/local/, /opt, /home, so that in future, if you have to reinstall (or
upgrade)you keep everything apart from / and /swap, where will be istalled
programs and packages that will be peculiar to you, and that you won't like
to reinstall.
Once you are finished with the installation, you take a notebook and -
everytime you change something - you write it down, and you do it quickly,
before you forget what you have done. That will enable you 1) to ask for
help, 2) to undo the changes, 3) to find again, quickely, the mooves that
give good results.
Apart form this, if you change the contents of a file, do save its pristine
contents first. For instance, if you modify file /hell/murder do first cp
/hell/murder /hell/murder.old.
You will see: life will be much easier.
Yours frindly,
Piero.
Piero Caracciolo
54, rue de Bourgogne
75007 Paris - France
