Bad hard drive or bad kernels ???

Richard Shaw hobbes1069 at gmail.com
Mon Jun 14 15:47:25 UTC 2010


On Sat, Jun 12, 2010 at 12:18 AM, Linuxguy123 <linuxguy123 at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Fri, 2010-06-11 at 10:09 -0500, Richard Shaw wrote:
>> On Fri, Jun 11, 2010 at 10:05 AM, Patrick O'Callaghan
>> <pocallaghan at gmail.com> wrote:
>> > On Fri, 2010-06-11 at 03:00 -0500, Mike McCarty wrote:
>> >> Linuxguy123 wrote:
>> >> > On Thu, 2010-06-10 at 23:50 -0430, Patrick O'Callaghan wrote:
>> >> >> On Thu, 2010-06-10 at 21:22 -0600, Linuxguy123 wrote:
>> >>
>> >> [...]
>> >>
>> >> >> Have you run memcheck?
>> >> >
>> >> > You mean fsck ?   Something runs about every 20 boots and it comes back
>> >> > clean.  I haven't specifically run fsck.
>> >>
>> >> I think he means memtest. It's a boot style program which
>> >> checks for common memory problems.
>> >
>> > Yes, memtest and not memcheck. Apologies for the mixup.
>>
>> Getting in here a little late...
>>
>> If your HD is failing, this may be a moot point, but one thing I
>> started doing was having memtest, MHDD, and System Rescue CD images in
>> my /boot partition and created GRUB boot options for them.
>>
>> If anyone is interested on how it's done I'll post some simple instructions.
>
> Please do !

Here's the short version:

1. Mount the System Rescue CD (ISO or real disc).
2. Copy the following files/directores (or all of them) into a
directory: /boot/sysrcd

bootdisk
bootprog
isolinux
ntpasswd
sysrcd.dat

3. Modify your /boot/grub/menu.lst with the following lines:

title System Rescue CD
        root (hd0,0) <--- This needs to be the same as your other menu
entries and may not be (hd0,0)
        kernel /sysrcd/isolinux/rescue64 subdir=sysrcd  <--- I'm
running the 64bit version, adjust accordingly
        initrd /sysrcd/isolinux/initram.igz
title MHDD
        root (hd0,0) <--- Same here
        kernel /sysrcd/isolinux/memdisk floppy
        initrd /sysrcd/bootdisk/mhdd.img
title Memtest86
        root (hd0,0) <--- same here
        kernel /sysrcd/bootdisk/memtestp

4. How this works:
System Rescue CD is a linux based system so it works like booting any
other system but the initrd looks for the file sysrcd.dat hence the
"subdir" option.

MHDD is a floppy based image. Memdisk is part of syslinux and lets you
boot all sorts of images directly from GRUB. You use the memdisk file
as the "kernel" and the image you're trying to load as the inital ram
disk.

Memtest86 boots directly.

Hope you find this helpful.

Richard


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