Hello there,

I'm not sure if is not ideal miallist for my problem, but maybe somebody
will be able to help me.
I do not know there to look for help.

I have Dell Optiplex GX-60 diskless (niether CDROM nor FDD, it got Ethernet
only) machine with RedHat Linux which is booting and lanching some
application.
I need to stop this application and go back to shell and modified system to not to launch that application.
Nothing seems to work, I have tried everything I could think of.

Any advice will be surly appreciated.

I took up HDD from that machine and added it as second HDD to other machine with RH Linux.
# fdisk -l /dev/hdb
give me:
/dev/hdb1 * 1 933 7494271 7 HPFS/NTFS
# mount -t ntfs /dev/hdb1 /mnt/hdd

to my surprise there is Windows on that partition, not even a trace of Linux.

CHS od HDD is 14888 cylinders 16 heads and 63 sectors so ~ 7.3GB
df -m gives me:
7.3GB so nothing is hidden.


Any advice ?

Regards
Slawomir

That is quite a puzzle! I wish I were there.

Check the BIOS of the GX-60 to make sure that it boots from the hard drive and not the network... Perhaps it is doing PXE booting of RedHat.

Do you see Windows booting at the beginning? Perhaps it is launching RedHat from Windows with an emulator or virtual machine. What messages do you see on the screen during boot? It is possible there is a network bootloader in the MBR of the GX-60 drive. What happens if you unplug the network and boot?

If the second machine is Linux only, and has no Windows, you should be able to clear the drive with dd. Be careful, you could clobber something unintended! Of course, with the drive clear, there should be no OS to boot on the GX-60. You will need to do an installation on the second machine or boot from a USB drive on the GX-60. It is a little tricky to install on another machine and transfer the drive back. You would need to edit /etc/fstab on the installation filesystem to point to the correct drive on the GX-60...

If your GX-60 boots some programme, can you exit the programme from a GUI, or by typing CTRL-c or by opening another console, ctrl-alt-F1? If it is Windows running, ctrl-alt-del may do something...


Let us know what you find.

I have checked it is booting from HDD,
There is no sign of Windows at any time, I could see it is Linux RedHat nash 3.4.xx.
There are normal messages you would see in dmesg after booting linux. After starting all services form init, application starts.
Unplugging network does not change a thing. I tried to exit GIU by CRTL-Q,C CRTL-ATL_Fx you named it , it is only displaying volume level when I do that, somebody caught all interruption known to me. Application seems unstopable.

Whole windows is taking about 1.8GB, how do I find that hidden Linux or better stop application and go back to shell. Second machine to which I conncted HDD is RedHat Linux only.
Regards
Slawomir

Very peculiar. You could try a diffferent fdisk, like cfdisk to see if it sees anything different. It is probably a grub loader, perhaps you can interrupt it to get the grub menu...

If that does not work, try borrowing a floppy or CD drive to do the install on the GX-60. You may need to adjust the BIOS to boot from the borrowed drive.

My fdisk sees whole HDD, there is only bootable HPFS/NTFS partition with windows OS. So Windows have to boot linux (which I could not find). Timeout must be zero in grub.conf because I do not see it during boot time.
regards
Slawomir

Can you borrow a floppy or CD drive, put it on the GX-60 and install over the whole disk? You might try a Knoppix live CD first to make sure the system is compatible.

Doing that would not I erase whole HDD ?
I do not want to loose content of this HDD ?
regards

Knoppix live CD does not write anything to disk unless you run some installer application. You could use Knoppix to examine the subject partition and move the stuff you want to save to another disk the you install or connect via USB. You could also start a web server in Knoppix and serve the relevant directories to another computer. To be safe, mount the partition read-only. You will need to install a CD drive temporarily to run Knoppix, of course.