Hello I post in this forum in fact hoping that I shouldn't do it...

That's my point :
I had FC2 installed in my laptop, and everything worked fine. I was compiling and installing a program one day, then when I went into the directories it created, my whole system crashed, and I only could make a hard reset. But when it was to reboot, I had a kernel panic message (try to pass an init= option... ). But why ? I didn't change anything, it all worked good until then, and the program that I was installing is nothing special at all (a program to edit graphs that I used for my studies).

So now come the strange things:
I started a knoppix session to examin my hard disk. I first thought it could be a physical problem (which of course would be the worse). First I went to the directories of the installation that caused the crash, and they were not there, they had disapeared ! I made a full fsck check, with bad blocks and all this, and I had no bad blocks. But it found a lot of inodes that were not referenced, and a lot of other errors concerning the same inodes (for exemple, the inode referenced by .. does not exist, ...). All the inode numbers were following each other. So I went to lost+found, and, what a surprise, it was all my files that disapeared, created by my last installation !!!

But the strange things do not stop here. When in knoppix I make a chroot to the hard disk (chroot /mnt/sda2 which used to be the / partition), I have a /bin/bash no such file or directory; eventhough it does exist. So I manually go to /mnt/sda2/bin and type ./bash, and it does not find the libraries, eventhough they are also present.

Another strange thing I had. When I want to do in windows a check of the partitions with partition magic, for exemple with a Check for Errors, or just Properties, it all works for my windows partitions and for the swap partition, but when I do this with either the /boot or the / partition, the program crashes, with a message like Access Violation in module PMagicnt.exe at address...

So my question is : I am completely lost, I realy don't have any idea of what is the problem. Can it be a hardware problem ? What can it be except of bad blocks ? How can I test it ? Should I reinstall my system ? Should I throw away my hard disk and buy another one ? (The last option I hope)

Thank you for your help, and sorry for my draft english, I'm in a hurry.

Alexandre

alxp; question? program u used & installed, was it a linux app or other source? believe that caused crash. some where read tutorial or howto on how to install other apps not native to linux to avoid problems. sorry cannot recall where but within lqo or mdk maybe even text on RH-FC. will rerply when found.

It's hard to determine from your post exactly what steps you might have been executing or what program you were attempting to compile/install. However, clearly something went seriously wrong, because as you've stated, installing a new package should be routine matter, and it should not damage the kernel and/or mess with your system files.

Given the uncertain nature of the problem, and the uncertain condition of your machine, the best bet may be to make backup copies of any important files that you can recover, then do a clean reinstallation of FC2. It may be possible to recover from the problem through other ways, however, even so it may take a lot longer than just doing a reinstall, plus I don't know that I'd have confidence in the final results anyway.

Good luck with it, regardless of what you decide -- J.W.

OK thank you for your answers,

In fact it's what I was planning to do, it was just a desperate post in case someone had a less radical solution...

The fact was that I wanted to know the problem so that it doesn't happen again. Time will tell.

Alex