How can I figure-out the actual cause of the kernel panic that's preventing a successful boot -- I'm hoping it's something I can fix, but concerned I may really need to buy a new hard-drive.

I'm running Debian Etch /Stable
According to dmesg :Linux version 2.6.18-5-686 (Debian 2.6.18.dfsg.1-13etch4) (dannf@debian.org) (gcc version 4.1.2 20061115 (prerelease) (Debian 4.1.1-21))


Lately this box has sometimes had trouble booting, and might just freeze up, even while not in active use. At least once it seemed to turn itself off. I first really noticed this after a recent power-fluctuation about a week or two ago. (Attempts to CTRL-ALT-Fx did not succeed, so brute-force power-off was required.

Sometimes restarting would take two or three tries, and I think I saw messages about initrd or initrd-img or something like that flash by, but the automatic fsck and ext3 seemed to deal with this -- so I put it down to "bad" shutdowns.

After the last lock-up though, I have had to resort to Knoppix. Before booting into Knoppix though, I hand-copied this from the monitor.

Trying to follow up on this, I have no idea why it would look for a "resume image" -- this is not a lap-top. Trying to verify in /etc/fstab my recollection that hdb2 is my swap partition, I discovered that my /etc file has apparently been replaced with a supposed (broken) link to 'librt-2.3.6.so'.

I am suspecting that my hard drive was damaged in the power fluctuation that I mentioned, which was sharp and brief enough that it shutdown my computer though nothing else was greatly affected. Previous incidents either rebooted (rather than shutdown) the computer, or also reset VCR's, clocks, etc.

But as I may be jumping to conclusions, I thought I'd seek informed opinions and advice on what I can/should try or do about figuring this out.

Issue and read "man fsck.ext3" and choose which options you want to use.

Backup any data you don't want to lose before you begin.

Another method is to get the utility from your hard drive manufacturer to test your disk, i.e., SeaTools from Seagate.

Did that before posting.
That's aa interesting idea, thanks! (Though the last few times I looked for a manufaturer's utility (eg. BIOS flasher/updater?) it was only available in Windows version. And last time I tried looking up HD info, the site was Windows-only. But I'll do some looking.

I was assuming that there would be some pertinent tool available in Knoppix, but all I found was hdparm and bonnie -- which don't seem what I'm looking for.

My (non-techie) working assumption is that this is a failing hard-drive, but was hoping for some guidence about either confirming this or about what else could account for the symptoms.

What brand is your hard drive? I'll give you a link ...

It's a Maxtor 5T040H4.

I found that the relevent link appears to be the one you already supplied, but the tools listed appear to be DOS or Windows specific.

They are not. There is something called Max<whatever> 4.n.m (sorry, I forgot the exact name, but it is a tool you can download from the Maxtor site, it has a version number of 4.something like 4.1.3 or 4.2.5). Copy to a floppy and boot from there...

Seagate bought Maxtor ... just go to the link and download the iso image, check the md5sum, burn a CD, boot your computer with it and following the bouncing balls.