Hey gang,

Well, I've done something to my system again that I need you smart fellers for.

I have been using slackpkg for trhe past 5 or 6 months I think, and with good results. I even used it for the kernel update before this last one for 15.0 x64 and all went well.

This time though, I'm not sure what happened or where it happened, but I had to shut down the system today because of a power outage. When I bootrd back up 30 minutes later, I was greeted with this on a black screen in the upper left corner:

It originally was that with the added:

Seeing's as I have no clue what 'PXE' is and have never seen a message like this before, I figured for some reason it was trying to boot from my modem, so I unplugged the network wire and rebooted and just got the first line above about checking media presence.

I went into my BIOS, and nothing had changed, other than it was showing the network plug as 'lit up' instead of the UEFI hard drive I should be booting from.

I'm going to presume that I screwed up somehow and didn't get the

done as I usually do and now the system has no clue what to boot from.

I simply have no idea what to do about this, nor even what to look/search for as a question in a search.

Is there any 'easy' way out of this mess...one easy enough for an idiot who has a hard time counting to ten or remembering his name? Really, I need it to be nice and simple, though I'm sure it can't be, heh.

It doesn't look like a forgotten initrd or eliloconfig. Yes, PXE means booting from a server. Seems like it can't find the hard drive at all. Maybe the disk broke? Is the time about correct in the BIOS? (CMOS battery flat?)

1 members found this post helpful.

Doesn't sound good. System is trying to boot from network (PXE) because it can't find hard disk. Yes, that's possible : you can have a diskless system which boots from a network server via your ethernet cable.

Can you boot from a live DVD or USB to check that hard disk?

1 members found this post helpful.

Sorry for the late reply, I've been going nuts trying to get my system back and losing sleep doing it, heh.

The time is correct in the BIOS, and the BIOS even still sees all the drives in the system. It even has a thing for doing an NVME_SSD self test that tests the integrity of the drive.

The system is set-up thusly:

NVME 1 - / and /boot
NVME 2 - /home
3TB HDD - SDA 1, 2, 3

Well, I did the 'self test' on the /home drive and it was okay and took about 30 minutes. I just now got around to doing the self test on the / drive and it was done in less than 30 seconds and said it 'failed'.

It looks like the / NVME drive is a goner. This is a WD Black SN850 500GB drive. I thought I'd done enough research and reading up on NVME drives to believe that these things were going to be far better than old HDD's or even SSD's. Apparently I was wrong. I can't afford to buy this kind of junk living on a disability check, and had got all my components for a 'new' system (I hadn't built a 'new' one for myself in almost 12 years!) with some of the money from an insurance settlement when a car t-boned me as I was on my motorcycle. Of course that money is now gone, so, it looks like I'm going to be looking for myself a nice HDD once again, of which since 1993 I've not had a single one go bad on me other than a couple when I started out and was using that garbage called Microslop and two of them couldn't take the brown-outs we have out here in the country. Once I went over to Linux (the year 2000) and ReiserFS, I've yet to have a problem with my HDD's dying on me.

<sigh>...this is really a let down, knowing that something that looked so good - NVME, is pretty much garbage after a year, and I've had battery backups since around 2006, just for the extra safety. Man...I'm really bummed.

Oh, by the way, I tried my slackware live USB and it booted up, *BUT* for some reason I couldn't get it to boot into graphical mode. Trying

as root or user wouldn't work. I'm going to make another live overwriting this one and see if maybe something just somehow got boogered. I've never had a slackware live on a USB not work for me before and I'm hoping it's something silly I did during the making of it, heh.

Anyway, thank you both for the help with my problem, it looks like I'm going to have to get a new HDD and put Slackware on it and hope I can figure out how to make it use my /home drive so I can do a *complete* backup of it and be ready for when *THAT* NVME croaks on me.

So you could boot Slackware live, that is a good thing!

From Slackware live, what is the output of:

Are you able to see your NVME 1 with the boot partition when running the command above as root?

regards Henrik

It looks like I can see it. Here are the results (minus the slough of 'loops' which I believe are the live USB drive):

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