[PLUG] How to Troubleshoot a Dead Machine

[Bill Thoen]

On 3/1/2011 12:43 AM, Russell Senior wrote:
>>>>>> "Bill" == Bill Thoen<bthoen at gisnet.com>  writes:
> Bill>  My super-cheep China-made PC clone running FC5 died last weekend
> Bill>  after a power failure and the disc drive was off for a day or
> Bill>  two. It never recovered. When I powered up on Monday, the CPU
> Bill>  fan would switch on normally and that's all it would do. No
> Bill>  boot, didn't even get to grub.  Everybody in the office here
> Bill>  told me that it was the motherboard. Well I have backups and it
> Bill>  wasn't a front-line machine anyway, but I still would rather get
> Bill>  the old disk running than dig out the archives because my
> Bill>  backups are not up to the minute.
>
> Bill>  So I had another old machine that worked and I removed its
> Bill>  drives and stuck this other machine's drive in its place and
> Bill>  tried to boot it. What I got was basically no drive info
> Bill>  found. It couldn't find VolGroup01 and then it couldn't find
> Bill>  other system files it was looking for and it froze at switchroot
> Bill>  failed to mount...  The setup menu can see the disk
> Bill>  though. Could it be a conflict in what was in CMOS memory, or
> Bill>  something like that? Does one not "just swap drives" on linux
> Bill>  machines like that?
>
> Don't try to boot, use a live-CD or something, and then *mount* the
> drives from the dead system (read-only, if possible).  Then copy
> whatever you need (possibly everything) onto another machine or disk
> or whatever you think is best for you.  Keep the old disks intact to
> preserve your options, at least until you are absolutely certain you
> have everything you need off of them
Thanks! Seems so obvious in hindsight.

-- 
*Bill Thoen*
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