Crashed system-Mdk moderator's wrong advice.
 

I was told I could safely install a newer kernel to my system and it would just install along side my old kernel and I could then be free to config/compile it at my leasure. Now my system is down. Looks like I am going to loose everything and have to do a re-install. I have a question that may be rather stupid but I need to know so I'll ask anyway. My computer is dual cpu w/over 1g ram. The MDK kernel in 9.2 has what I can only call a memory leak. As ram is used it is not freed back up when the process is done. They have an article on it and it is only like that in systems running a lot of ram. That is why I needed to upgrade my kernel. Now--the question: Since I am going to have to re-install, what would be the reason why I couldn't (1) Burn the install Disk-1 to a re-writeable cd. (2) Go online using MegaSuck XP and download the latest 2.4 kernels. (3) Copy the new kernels to the disk and remove the old ones. (4) Burn the "updated" cd to a cd-rom. Then install with the "NEW" kernels that don't have the memory problem?:confused: :scratch:

Thanx
 

Thanks so much for all the help I have received in this forum. You have really helped me get my system back up running again. --NOT--

Re: Thanx
 

Well with an attitude like that, who would want to help you really? Plus give members time, you posted a followup about an hour later. May I ask you to read our rules in which it states to only bump your threads after a 24 hour time period if no responses.

It is considered rude and inconsiderate to do what you did.

Also by posting that a member or even Moderator in your thread title only shows your childish/immature response in which members here are attempting to help you for free. Did you have to pick up a phone and give your credit card to get an answer? No, you did not.
If something didn't work, you shouldn't go about crying or posting about it the way you did. You should followup and ask for more help, explain what has happened in following their advice that got you where you are now.

Also take note that members here are not responsible if the advice and responses they give will even work. I would guess 99.9% of the time that is not likely, but you never know coming to a free site in which members are only here in their own spare time to help people like you. Half the time if a member gives wrong answers, another will correct them.

I don't ask anyone to never use our site but from reading your response, if you don't like recieving free help and only reply like you did above, well, I don't want you as a member of this site with your attitude you've shown today. Either ask for help or don't ask at all, its that simple.

That is all I have to say.

Regards.

Thanx
 

I really need that. I have been on a dozen forums all day long and my system is still down. At least on the other forums someone tried to help within 30 minutes or so. At least they tried. Mine has been here all day and made it most of the way to the bottom of the list on this page and no one even tried to help. As for the moderator, I thought it pretty bad that a moderator would give such bad advice. Since my last post I have spoken with the moderator of that forum and was informed that the person who instructed me was not now a moderator. So in that I was wrong. I am impatient because I am no closer to haveing the system up right now than I was this morning and it looks like I am going to loose everything for sure. I am sure you have never had a bad day X1000? One thing that should make you a little happier, the odds are I will loose the entire system. Why I say happier is, from your point of view anyway, that I am going to be punished. The system being lost is my punishment. You might be angry because of my attitude earlier but at least I will get my punishment.

I am much calmer now that I know I have no hope of system recovery. Depressed, yes. Angry and impatient, no. I have lost the fight. Happy Holidays.

Re: Thanx
 

I'm sorry for you loss but you have think, reacting the way you did does not help you now does it? And especially the reaction you made, well, like I said earlier, who wants to help someone who shows such an attitude.

This is a very busy forum, your question might get answered within a matter of minutes or it might be days. Its free, I wouldn't complain about the time you recieve answers on a free site to get help. You have to also consider your post is very misleading as it provided nothing we can really help you with. We don't know why you couldn't do the things you say didn't work, you didn't provide in what you tried or how you did it, any errors, software used, and so on.

And I'm confused about the moderator bit now. Are you speaking of another forum? Well, if you got bad advice there, well, keep it there. Don't make it sound as if our moderators here gave you bad advice or any of our members gave bad advice.

Now going over your posts on this site which is a total of 9, not one was regarding your problem you have posted about until this thread and you make it sound like were the bad guys. The next time you want to followup when asking for help (may I ask again, don't bump it within an hour's time especially with your given response as our rules indicate), maybe if you were a little more polite, you would have gotten some answers or advice.

Regards.

I am not a guru, so I cannot give you an advice how to recover the original system.
However, the system can be replaced in an hour with a fresh install, so that is not a great loss.

What are precious, are your files, if any. Losing a kernel does not mean that you lose your files. Those are still there and are safe as long as you do not reformat or delete the partitions where they reside.

Can you copy the files to a safe place before you install the new system?

dude, BACKUP your system. Especially if you are still learning (as we all are) then you wouldn;t have this problem, it would simply be an issue of sitting through a restore....

then, I would recomend doing a fresh install but not formatting your precious files. If it is some configuration files your afraid of loosing, then you could look into using your cd as a rescue disk and copying them to either a safe partition or another media.

Please don't come in here and blame a mod for your mess up.

It is nobody's fault but yours that you didn't:

1) backup your box

2) spend a little more time researching stuff before you just "did" it.

Do you really think that people will help you with a post like this? You are purposley shooting yourself in the foot.

Read, Read, Read........do more research.........and backup your box before you do stuff you've never done before. Or....at least do it on a box you don't care about reloading.

I've messed my boxes up so many times that only a reload could fix it. I however never did it on my main box. That box is tweaked and just runs and runs :)

Anyway.....I hope you change your attitude and decide to stick around. If you do that.....we'll both have much more fun ;)

Peace,
Whitehat

Maybe, and just maybe, you could try putting a Live CD as Knoppix and try to access your partitions and backup your stuff(?). I've never done it before, but that's what I should do. About the kernel... it's pretty difficult to get it going. Unless you really need to install a new kernel for an unsupported hardware, you most likely will most likely get yourself in trouble. Remember this wise phrase "If it's not broken, don't fix it".

You may have a bad kernel but you should be able to switch back to the old one and boot back into it and get your stuff.

I am currently in Gentoo and have three or four versions of 2.4 and 3 versions of 2.6. I just tell grub which one to boot by editting the boot line.

I don't know what happened but during one of my latest stupid mistakes, my fault, I just booted the Gentoo CD, mounted the drives and copied over what I wanted to save, which was the portage directory that I spent 4 nights downloading.

I'm sort of with trickykid here. I would really like to help and could likely help you get your data back at least, but I don't want or need the responsibility if something goes wrong.

Hope you get it going. Even Linux screws up on occasion, not as much as windows though.

Later

:D :D :D

Thank you for your understanding. I have over 80 gig of files not counting another 30 or so in operating system. At this time I have no way to back up. I do have other boxes but they are in use like this one. I am sorry I did not make myself clear that the advice given in a forum actually came from another forum (not this one). Re-installing the O.S. isn't what takes so long. I am using the box I crashed right now. What takes so long is ---Samba, ldap, nis, dns, etc....Also I have some hardware that for some reason takes forever to get setup right. It will be about a month before I have most of the system working right again. The reason this all started is because the -10 kernel doesn't handle memory correctly. I had one fellow tell me that the reason my ram was showing so low was because the system was setting it aside for cache and that meant the system was working correctly. This was not correct. The ammount of free ram just keeps dropping until my system gets unstable and I have to reboot. I have 1 gig of rdram. The articles on the -10 kernel that I have read states that this is a known problem on some of the larger systems with 1gig+ ram. The official word is "update the kernel". That is one thing I have never done. My goal was to try to work on a kernel (experiment) in a way that it would not bring the system down. I was assured that I could do this safely and was told to "install" the new kernel from the internet "alongside" my old one. URPMI or Mandrake Update either one could take care of it. Don't try it. It doesn't work. So, now I am stuck with the -10 and a month of 12 to 16 hour days (not counting how long it will take to get caught back up). Borderline panic and anger at someone for steering me so wrong and anger at me for being so stupid as to believe them. Now my business will have to try to play catch up right here at tax season. Could NOT have happened at a worse time.

Then thing on the right says "guru" but I'm not sure about that sometimes but here goes.

As far as I know most of the kernel will support up to 4GBs of memory. That said, most distro's only compile in 768MBs instead. My Mandrake does not have high mem turned on either. I can go in and turn it on and then recompile the kernel so that it will.

The problem you are having I have never read before. Usually the memory is just plain not recognized and that is it. It is as if there is only the amount of memory it 'sees' and that is all.

When I compiled the kernel for Gentoo I chose to support up to 4GBs, it says it can go to 64GBs but my mobo will only support 3GBs so why go that far. :scratch:

If you have a spare drive, or free space, and really want to save that data you can. Either create a partition big enough or put in a drive and format the drive with ext2, ext3 or whatever Linux file system. When you get that done get you a live CD like a knoppix or a Gentoo install CD, which I have. I have to assume that knoppix will work the same as Gentoo from what I have read. When you get booted off of the CD do this.

mkdir /mnt/old
mkdir /mnt/new

Those would be the mount points for the partitions you want to copy from and to.

Then mount the partitions. Example only here. Replace with the partitons you need.

mount /dev/hda5 /mnt/old

That would be the old data that you want to save. Then mount the new partition that you want to save too.

mount /dev/hdb1 /mnt/new

You should have the partitions mounted and ready to copy. This part is what may take a while. Copy:

cp -rpv /mnt/old/* /mnt/new/

The r means recursive, the p means keep permissions and such, the v means display the file name on the screen, that way you can see it getting copied.

umount and remount until you get them all copied. Repeat for each partition until you are done. After that just reboot. You now have a backup of that partition(s).

That is a really basic way of doing that. I used that process when I bought a new hard drive and wanted to change over without re-installing anything. It worked flawlessly. It should work for what you have.

Note that it will maintain ownerships of files. If user goofy owned the file on the old partiton then goofy will own the new one too. You will either have to change that as root or make sure you have the same user set up on the new system.

As I said that is really basic. More advice.

I have a really slow connection so I back up files to a seperate hard drive. I mount it as a data drive and use reiserfs for the file system. I make copies of any software, my Gentoo portage tree, and any documents that I have. Portage is the same as downloaded software. I also have wrote guides for installing Mandrake and the NVIDIA drivers so I keep copies of those.

I do this so that if the worst happens, at least I have the stuff downloaded anyway. I have spent many nights downloading and updating Gentoo. I would suggest that you come up with a scheme for backing up any data that you don't want to loose.

Don't know if that will help or not but there it is. Post if you have questions. I may not be right but I'll try anyway.

Later

:D :D :D

If you boot up using your 1st Mandrake setup disk, and enter rescue, you can get back into your system. The old kernel and initrd files are probably still in the /boot partition. You may want to remove the generic links linux and initrd to point to your previous kernel and initrd versions.

If you install a new kernel using the software installer, there should have been a new entry when you boot up, but with the same default. However, things may be different if you are installing a 2.6 kernel. There is a 9.2 mdk kernel that you can install that is configured machines with upto 4 gigs of memory.

Thought of something else. If you can't get your problem fixed using the rescue system. You can re-install using the update mode. Failing that, you can re-install and not reformat the partition which contains your data. This works if you have the data on a seperate partition, or if your /home is on a seperate partition. At least then your old data will be there. Consider giving yourself a different user name, and your old home partition won't be touched at all.

As far as memory goes, the kernel will use up to 4GB with highmem turned off. This number, which might seam arbitrary to some people, is equal to 2^32, or the max unsigned integer on a 32bit CPU.

As far as memory not being freed when a process gives it up......

What are you using to see how much "free" memory you have? The kernel does not let go of every piece of memory that is freed because there is no reason to. Rather, it keeps track of it and if a program asks for memory and there isn't enough "free" it'll do some cleanup. As a result applications like top will almost always say your system is using most of your memory, which is in fact not really true. If in fact there is a memory leak, it is more likely an application that doesn't properly free memory when it allocates it (Netscape has been particularly bad for this in the past) rather then the kernel, unless Mandrake really screwed with the memory management parts of it.

And make sure you follow the golden rule of kernel updates... NEVER have a newly built kernel be the only boot option for your system. I have compiled more kernels manually then I could ever remember and even still I will accidentally put in the wrong set of options and come out with an unbootable kernel occasionally, especially when trying a new kernel series (like when I went to 2.6 the first time).