redhat 9 stops working after 3 years
 

evening all,

that's right - after 3 glorious years [and just as i was about to transfer a finished mambo installation for a friend to their live servers] my rh9 install has given up, hopefully not irrepairably!

symptoms : -

machine starts - interactive boot gives a string of OKs - text login flashes prior to attempting to load gnome graphical login screen - flashes a band of colour - and then loops the text login ad infinitum.

all is not lost - by using linux rescue i can remount the file system and chroot - but with no network support or cd writer getting the files off is a challenge.

any thoughts or ideas where to go from here ?

rgds


bdjt

Maybe its time for an upgrade to Fedora Core, CentOS or RHEL.

thanks - that's got it...;)

but seriously - i have loaded fc2 and 3 on another machine - fc2 decided to ignore all other logins other than root, wouldn't play the previously working sound under rh9 and fc3 decided to not recognise the wireless card or sound card - 6 weeks of tail chasing and i gave up and reverted to my last stable option - which i believe is good computing practice !!

i do have ubuntu running on another machine trouble free - assuming i did dig out my fc3 disks, and someone has cracked the wireless networking/sound issues - is it as simple as installing this and having all the stuff i've carefully installed over the years - php, apache, mysql, wine etc - carry on working ?

i'd be pleasantly amazed if that were the case!!

rgds

bdjt

Have you tried FC4? Wireless is unfortunately still a pain to setup on most Linux distros, but if you get the Windows drivers for your card, I am sure you can get it to work using ndiswrapper. As for your server software, you may have to backup your data and config files because installing a new distro will obviously overwrite the old packages.

yep, this happened to me too.....
Not sure why, but I reinstalled.

I think it was a problem with X86.....

The reinstall went fast and no data was lost......
RH9 asked if I wanted to update and that was it.....

Different ways to get into the system so you can change the runlevel:
1)
<ctrl><alt><F1/2/3/4/5/6>; from your post I assume that that does not work
2)
using the rescue disk
3)
start the system in single user mode and change the runlevel. In lilo by simply entering the labelname followed by the word single and pressing <enter>; don't know for grub.

Next edit the runlevel and reboot. At least you will have a functional system back.

redhat 9 - etc - looks promising
 

wim

thanks for this - can you couch this in terms you might use in explaining to a dog, albeit a very bright dog, but a dog nonetheless:)

> 2) using the rescue disk

got that far but couldn't bring up network or cd support [to compound problems the machine was wireless and only has a pcmcia slot for network cards]


> 3) start the system in single...

this i like the sound of - i just need to learn what it means...

> single user i can get from rh9 online manuals so that's ok

> simply entering the labelname - not sure what that means

> edit the run level - see 'simply'

i'll be eternally grateful for any clarification on these - thanks in advance.

rgds

bdjt

redhat 9 - is there another way ?
 

ok - on the problematic machine it appears to be the gnome graphic login that's, and i'm going to get technical here, freaking out, so how can i try to boot to the command line on a machine that had a graphic install ?

i remain etc

bdjt

part solution
 

hi,

always nice to clear up

as i said - graphic login was looping without giving you the chance to login.

solution - boot to text and sort out the graphics issue from there - still able to run webservers, edit files, and most importantly - initialise network support!!

i went to /etc and edited the inittab file at line 10 to read

id:3:initdefault:

from

id:5:initdefault:


5 boots to a graphic i/f; 3 to a command line.

now i just need to work on starting and stopping a graphic i/f from the command line and repair mysql and i'm there !!!!

inittab file shown below.

# Default runlevel. The runlevels used by RHS are:
# 0 - halt (Do NOT set initdefault to this)
# 1 - Single user mode
# 2 - Multiuser, without NFS (The same as 3, if you do not have networking)
# 3 - Full multiuser mode
# 4 - unused
# 5 - X11
# 6 - reboot (Do NOT set initdefault to this)
#
id:5:initdefault:

thanks to all who tried...

rgds

bdjt

and finally.........
 

once i was properly onto the machine -

[root@scaramanga mysql]# df
Filesystem 1K-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted On
/dev/hda2 5289380 5289380 0 100% /


useful note to self - a little housekeeping once in a while [remove old .tar files for instance] will work wonders.

got there by reading the error logs for mysql which said there was no space left to write to at start up!!

cleared down a bit - mysql started - changed inittab back to a 5 and lo, there was light!!

rgds

bdjt