Hi folks,

I'm in the midst of troublshooting a system which has decided not to play nice after a brownout last night, and would appreciate some help. I've taken this as far as my knowledge allows, but am hoping that there's something that I've missed.

First off, brownouts normally don't pose a problem but this one caught me between a UPS failure and purchasing a replacement.

FWIW, the system is a AMD 1800+ attached to a Tyan S2390B.

The symptoms: Booting from the hard drive with LILO started kicking back a keytable read/checksum error. Attempting to boot from the distro CD produced a complaint about an extremely broken BIOS.

I've successfully re-flashed the BIOS, which has had no effect. Is there anything else, or should I consider the system to be FUBAR? I can boot it minimially with a DOS floppy, but I don't appear to have any means to get in to the system far enough to fsck the drive & re-run LILO.

I would appreciate any suggestions, other than to go shopping.


-d.

My vote goes to fubar ... have you tried DSL? But - a bios-wrecked error that stays after flashing? While brownouts are not normally a problem, they can be bad.

No, but until I worked a search engine just now the only thing I'd ever heard of with respect to DSL is a Digital Subscriber Line.

Damn Small Linux sounds interesting. I'll give it a shot... it's not as though I have anything to lose at this point. Thanks.

CMOS corruption is a possibility. Flashing BIOS does not reset CMOS, you have to do it manually.

That was good searching. DSL is small and powerful... I've often found it can boot systems that have been unmanageable to other distros.

Emerson is right - go into your bios settings and reset everything to defaults. You can re-tweak later.

If you have access to another machine, you can use it to diagnose possible fs trouble on your HDD.

You realize all this is "Clutching At Straws (TM)"? Of course, sometimes those straws turn out to be more support that expected.

Yeah I know.

This pile of straws is now in the compost bin. Neither a CMOS reset nor DSL would let me in, so I swapped in a backup mainboard yesterday morning. Now I have an excuse to upgrade one of our other systems because I no longer have a backup.

Thanks for the suggestions folks!

And the neet part is, you can make sure the new HW is 100% linux compat!