I'm in desperate need for help and I hope someone on this list is able to help me out, I'd really appreciate it.
I shut down my Debian box last night, and turned it off when it displayed the message "Power down." When I tried to boot tonight, it simply displayed "LI" and did nothing. Now the LILO manual says that this is either caused by a geometry error or by moving /boot/boot.b without running the map installer, but I did no such thing. I ran Partition Magic 4.01 from a DOS disk and, besides treating it like a 8.4 GB disk (it is a 10 GB IBM IDE drive), the partion table looks okay. Windows 98, occupying a little gaming partition (so sue me ;->) on this drive, boots fine. I am running a 2.2.10 kernel. The root partition has only 6 MB free space (according to Partion Magic), which is due to my running smbd with debug level 3, thus creating a rather large log file, but this shouldn't be a problem, should it? I tried booting from the slink boot disk with kernel 2.0.36, but it invariably fails, no matter what I try: pressing Return results in "Boot failed" after loading "root.bin", and typing "rescue root=/dev/hda7" gives "Boot failed" after displaying "Loading linux". This puzzles me, because even if the 2.0.36 kernel doesn't recognize the partition table for the 10 GB drive (the BIOS returns false values which the kernel 2.0.36 doesn't recognize, which is why I switched to a 2.2.x kernel in the first place), I see no reason why it shouldn't boot from the rescue disk so that I can try to mount the root partition to see what's wrong, or at least access some of the data to back it up before trying to fix anything. :-( Now, a friend of mine told me about a "rare file system bug" in kernels 2.2.9 and 2.2.10 that was fixed in 2.2.11 -- which I hadn't come around to installing yet :-( -- which might have wreaked havoc on my file system, causing LILO to fail. Could this be the source of the problem? If so, how can I fix it? Is there a way to access my hard drive by booting from a rescue disk? Do I need a 2.2.x kernel based boot disk for that? If this probably isn't the source of the problem, what could be? How can I proceed in order to make progress? I'll be more than glad to post any further information you might need -- I had just moved personal data on that drive last night, and haven't had a chance to back up yet! (Murphy strikes again.) :-( I really appreciate any replies! TIA, Matt
