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stuff *AT ALL* dies in a similar fashion, too, I'd say that you have some crucial part of the machine dieing ... Do you have memtest or other diagnostic tools on a bootable CD? Cheers, Tink |
Galego - Thanks:
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Thanks for the link - there is a lot of stuff in there. One thing I haven't tried is using Grub on a boot floppy. Do you think that would be worth a try? Hi Tinkster - glad to have you on board... Quote:
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However, Those nice people at Ubuntu have very kindly provided me with a "Memtest86+" option (see menu.lst above) which I am running now (I'm typing this from my work laptop). It's been running for about 25mins now - It's on Test 6 and doesn't seem to be showing any errors yet. I've never used it before so I have no idea what it's doing and what - if anything - it will tell me when it's done... Any other suggestions - from anyone! - very gratefully received. I'm getting desperate here! I'm back at work tomorrow and if I can't SSH into my FC5 box from work I will not be able to do stuff... Thanks to all Mark [Edit] Does anyone know how this Memtest thing works? After 45Mins it finished Test #8 and the overall "pass" line showed 98% (no errors apparent anywhere) and then just seemed to start again at test #1 with the overall pass line reset to 0%. Does it just keep going round till I tell it to stop? [/Edit] |
i dont know for a fact but it should not loop. if the mem test passes you may want to look into the power supply. if your power supply is dying out it is not uncommon for it to cause memory problems. which in turn might have had something to do with this whole issue.
the fact that booting from cd starts and then fails i would say that you may have Hardware problems. just guessing but worth a look. |
Yes - After about an hour and a half of watching little "#"s crawl across the screen I got bored. However, by that time I think I had worked out that the Memtest does as many "passes" through its set of tests as you will let it. By the time it had completed 2xPasses I had lost the will to live...
Anyhow - The tests showed no errors at all. I too am worried that it might be a hardware problem but I do think it is odd that Ubuntu can still boot but no other distro or CD. Also, with a bit of effort, I managed to get the Ubuntu live CD to boot (only in failsafe mode however). Another point: I made a comment above about Ubuntu complaining that it wasn't shut down properly. Well - after a little experimentation this is what I now think is happening: If I load Ubuntu and shut it down it will restart cleanly. If I shut down Ubuntu and try to boot FC5 (on /dev/hdb6 remember) and then restart Ubuntu it complains as follows: Code:
/dev/hdb7 was not cleanly unmounted Is this significant? Mark |
Like I said, it will say that anytime you do not shutdown properly. Everytime the power goes out mine does it to. Have you tried the Win98 recovery disk to see if it works?
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Or am I just being stupid (quite likely).... |
The computer has not been shut down properly. This is detected by any of your distros regardless of which distro you shutdown from.
Another question for you that might mimic hardware issues. Do you have any USB devices plugged into the computer, any PCMCIA, just unplug any unneccesary devices. And what about Win98 recovery disk? |
OK - Ubuntu won't boot now either...
I am now close to being convinced that it is a hardware problem - but.... Quote:
So where is my H/w problem? Any live distro, which as Tinkster says shouldn't touch the hard drive, fails to boot; but the Win98 rescue disk works. Is it my DVD or is it my Hard drive that is at fault? I have one more thing to try:- Quote:
Anything else requires a screwdriver and moving furniture and will have to wait for the weekend I'm afraid. Any suggestions as to what I should try first? Thanks to all Mark p.s. Stop Press! Ubuntu just booted! - It took about 30 tries but it eventually booted to the logon screen. I didn't bother to login because I was tying this on my laptop and then - boom - reboot... [edit] Removed the USB wireless connector - Still the same problems. Ubuntu has rebooted successfully however - Umm... no network though - ummm [/edit] |
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The fact that the Win98 recovery CD will boot, as long as Windows 98 itself, seems to contraindicate problems with the hardware then no? I'd say at this point wipeout the partition that has ubuntu in it and see if that cures your ales... |
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If I have a quiet evening this week I'll give it a go and I'll keep you posted... In the meantime if anyone has any other suggestions for things to try I would be very happy to hear them. I'd also like to take this opportunity to thank Debiant and everyone else who has tried to help me through this... Thanks Mark |
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I've had cases where Win98 was running quite happily but linux would crap out with segfaults all the time; in the end it was one bad RAM module that wasn't even being picked- up by memtest. Cheers, Tink |
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What tests - if any - should I be doing now? Thanks Mark |
In my case I determined it by taking one stick out, booting on one, then
swapping them. It must have been some sort of timing issue, though, because the stick worked fine in another machine. I'm not necessarily harping on about RAM because I feel certain that this is what your problem is, it could well be something more obscure, like some BIOS setting that has changed. What I was trying to point out is that Win98 (or 95, for that matter) make nowhere near as good use of the hardware as Linux does, and that if there's something flakey they may well run while Linux won't. Cheers, Tink |
I don't honestly know much about it, but is it possible that the Live Cds are trying to read the existing partitions and mbr of the system and failing, where as Win 98 cannot possibly do this. I'd say eliminating Ubunutu, maybe doing a fix /mbr from Win 98 recovery and then retrying Knoppix is at least worth a shot at this point.
It just seems odd that the Ubuntu installation and grub reinstall just happen to occur while the RAM goes bad. |
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