Given what has taken place, I would like an opinion as to whether or not the problem I am having is hardware related. Here is what is going on:

This is on a slackware 12.1 os.

Last night attempted to shut down and power off pc.
shut down stalled -- from log looked like it tried to reboot.
Powered off pc with the power switch.
This morning, when I tried to boot, bios said no active partition
bios is recognizing the hard drive.
Booted pc using gparted live cd.
booted ok;
one of the gparted-live options was to boot a hard drive, if available.
tried that, and pc booted ok using the installed grub loader.

So, can someone offer an opinion - What kind of problem am I looking at?

Gary

with the live cd do a few more things.

1. fsck all partitions
2. hdparm -I /dev/sda
3. smartd --help
(run the long test)

Also take a look at the boot log

What bootloader are you using ? lilo ? What filesystem are you using on your /boot partition (on whatever partition /boot is on) ? was there any error issued by the bootloader ?

H_TeXMeX_H, Thank you for the reply.

The bootloader is grub.
File system is ext3

When using the live-cd to boot , no -- no errors

I should have thought about this a little more before posting.
It looks like the error occurs before the bios reads the mbr.


the error displayed is "no active partition" Would this mean that the bios failed to read the master boot record? If this is true, and I can boot the system that is on the hard drive using the live-cd, then would this mean that the mbr got trashed? If thats true, can I re-load the mbr? without having to re-install grub?

Here is the fdisk listing of the primary master:
Gary

Yes, type grub and type setup (hd0,0). It should re-install grub in the MBR. If that does not work, a superblock might be corrupted, so run fsck.

Hello Electro,
Thanks for the reply.

I had to modify the grub procedure slightly. need to run crub command
"root (hd0,0)" before "setup (hd0,0)"

Unfortunately this did not solve the problem; connand "smartctl -l selftest /dev/hda" showed no errors on drive.

Next will be to get a new ribbon cable and see if that does any good.
I just hope the motherboard doesn't need to be replaced!.

Thanks to you and H_TeXMeX_H for getting me pointed in the right direction.

Gary


fsck indicated a bad superblock -- got to do a search
and find out where the backup superblocks are located.

"mkfs.ext3 -n ..." is probably easiest.
I recently had to ditch an old laptop when it decided it wouldn't boot the disk anymore - I got sick of booting the floppy.

Just a thought:
Check if your BIOS is still set to boot from the HD?

I had a similar issue immediately after a WindowsXP upgrade to SP3 on a dual boot system. Somehow / somewhere something changed and I had to get into the BIOS to fix it. I think the system tried to boot from the memory card that was inserted in my printer.

as he tiptoes off stage quietly, trying to make himself invisible---

Yes, the bios was set to boot from the hard drive; the problem was that there is another bios setting that specifies in what sequence the hard drives should be checked!

Somewhere along the way I must have managed to change that setting ---it was pointing to a hard drive with no bootable partition defined.



Oh well; everything was not lost; this resulted in convincing me to take the time to back up and then scan the hard drive.

Thanks, everyone; this has been another ??enjoyable?? learning experience

'The ghost of lost data'
(aka Gary)