[PLUG] Busted computer

John Jason Jordan johnxj at comcast.net
Wed Oct 17 16:44:08 UTC 2007


On Wed, 17 Oct 2007 07:53:19 -0700
m0gely <m0gely at telestream.com> wrote:

> John Jason Jordan wrote:
> 
> > Aside 2: On the outside of the case this appears to be a Compaq
> > R3240 laptop. In reality is is a rebadged Piece-O-Shit (tm) laptop
> > assembled from parts supplied by the lowest bidder by lead-poisoned
> > Chinese laborers. And yes, I have begun shopping for its
> > replacement.
> 
> Laptop hard drives are readily available.  No need to replace the
> entire machine unless there are /other/ reasons.  Just a FYI.

Yes, there are other reasons. The only good thing I have to say about
this machine is that it runs Ubuntu flawlessly and everything has
always just worked, except I did have to learn how to use ndiswrapper
for the wireless. The quality of the design and the components is the
problem. It's two and a half years old and is now in its second
keyboard, and many other things have had to be fixed as well. 

As for the hard drive, I replaced the original 60 GB 4200-rpm with an
80 GB 7200-rpm drive just to get better speed. Both drives have given
me constant problems similar to the current embroglio. And the reason
has nothing to do with the drives - they are fine. The problem is the
connector on the bottom of the motherboard which is 1/4 inch too far to
the right and 1/8 inch too deep. (See what I mean about rotten design?)
As a result the drive connection is flaky. I can't blame Linux, Ubuntu,
ext3, or even the drive itself when I get a corrupted filesystem. I
have inserted wedges and jimmied the thing around for long enough. I'm
sick of it. Time to move on. 

Back to the problem at hand. It is now morning, the first cup of coffee
is doing its thing, and the synapses are starting to function again. As
a result it occurred to me that I ought to try recovery mode to see
what the boot process is hanging on. That resulted in the following:

Begin: Running /scripts/init-bottom ...
Done.
run-init: /sbin/init: No such file or directory
[   35.786176] Kernel panic - not syncing: Attempted to kill init!
[   35.786242]

Whereupon it hangs. 

This looks repairable to me. Although my backups are sporadic,
elsewhere I do probably have a copy of whatever file it is looking for.
However, I could use some help figuring out exactly what file went 
missing after the thousands of repairs that e2fsck did last night. 

Using a Knoppix CD I find the following in the /boot folder:

/boot
	/grub
		splashimages [folder]
		default
		device.map
		e2fs_stage1_5
		fat_stage1_5
		jfs_stage1_5
		menu.lst (looked at with Gedit, seems intact)
		menu.lst (various backup copies)
		minix_stage1_5
		reiserfs_stage1_5
		stage1
		stage2
		xfs_stage1_5
	abi-2.6.20-15-generic
	abi-2.6.20-16-generic
	config-2.6.20-15-generic
	config-2.6.20-16-generic
	initrd.img-2.6.17-11-generic.bak
	initrd.img-2.6.20-15-generic
	initrd.img-2.6.20-15-generic.bak
	initrd.img-2.6.20-16-generic
	initrd.img-2.6.20-16-generic.bak
	memtest86+.bin
	System.map-2.6.20-15-generic
	System.map-2.6.20-16-generic
	vmlinuz-2.6.20-15-generic
	vmlinuz-2.6.20-16-generic

This looks normal to me. The boot menu lists the 15 and 16 kernels,
recovery modes for each, and memtest (five items total). 

In / there are also:

initrd.img
initrd.img.old
vmlinuz
vmlinuz.old

Any suggestions for what might be missing/corrupted?



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