Power cut woes

[Kevin J. Cummings]

On 09/28/2009 11:05 AM, Philip Heron wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> I have an old PC running F10, setup to play a simple animation in a
> display. Nothing fancy. Yesterday the town was hit with a series of
> power cuts which seems to have well and truely mucked it up. I took a
> picture of the kind of errors I'm getting:
> 
> http://www.bacomponents.co.uk/f10-startup-errors.jpeg
> 
> The HAL bit sits for ages, then the screen blanks. X fails to start,
> trying to login on the console gives me a password error, and ssh fails
> to connect. I've run e2fsck on the disk and it seems fine.
> 
> Should I just nuke it and start again? Or is there a handy way to fix it?

I'd look into the "errors" that happen way before hal tries to start.
I'd probably force an fsck on the partition that holds /etc because it
looks like your /etc/passwd file is messed up....  Maybe all of your
filesystems....  Then, again, perhaps this is the result of running fsck
on your filesystems after the power failures.  You may be SOL if you
were running fsck and took a power hit.  If that's the case, a
re-install may be your best bet.  Do you have file fragments in your top
level lost+found directories?

> -Phil
> 


-- 
Kevin J. Cummings
kjchome at rcn.com
cummings at kjchome.homeip.net
cummings at kjc386.framingham.ma.us
Registered Linux User #1232 (http://counter.li.org)