Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Terbs]

Hi all,
I am hoping you can help with this problem my son is having.....he asked if I would ask on the forum...its double dutch to me. All I know is its something to do with work and  something he needs for a customer in Zurich.......hope you don't mind. Here is the mail he sent me with the problem.....

Here are the issues I have with Linux.


OS Linux, Fedora Red Hat. Ver 2.6.15 (very old)


I have a SBC (Single board computer) with the Linux HDD.
The system loads the Bios OK, tries to load the Fedora from the HDD and I get the following issue.


“loading Fedora”
Vol/group/00 [OK]


Then it tries to start loading the file systems.
fsck.ext2 [OK]
fsck.ext3 does not exist when trying to opened /Dev/hda1


Work Carried out on site:
The customer had a totally dead motherboard/SBc, not booting anything.  There was power to the board but no initialization from the chip or anything.
I replaced it with one I had of the same type, and it at least boots up the bios now.  the bios recognizes the HDD. But I get the error above.


Question:
Changing the motherboard (SBC) for one of an identical type, with the existing HDD, is there a driver issue or do I need to load the HDD into a specific channel of the SBC?


Cheers


    I hope you wizards understand that and can help. I have faith 

[henryd]

Hi all,
I am hoping you can help with this problem my son is having.....he asked if I would ask on the forum...its double dutch to me. All I know is its something to do with work and  something he needs for a customer in Zurich.......hope you don't mind. Here is the mail he sent me with the problem.....

Here are the issues I have with Linux.


OS Linux, Fedora Red Hat. Ver 2.6.15 (very old)


I have a SBC (Single board computer) with the Linux HDD.
The system loads the Bios OK, tries to load the Fedora from the HDD and I get the following issue.


“loading Fedora”
Vol/group/00 [OK]


Then it tries to start loading the file systems.
fsck.ext2 [OK]
fsck.ext3 does not exist when trying to opened /Dev/hda1


Work Carried out on site:
The customer had a totally dead motherboard/SBc, not booting anything.  There was power to the board but no initialization from the chip or anything.
I replaced it with one I had of the same type, and it at least boots up the bios now.  the bios recognizes the HDD. But I get the error above.


Question:
Changing the motherboard (SBC) for one of an identical type, with the existing HDD, is there a driver issue or do I need to load the HDD into a specific channel of the SBC?


Cheers


  I hope you wizards understand that and can help. I have faith 

I do,its F---ed

[Gaffers]

Has he tried to mount the drive on another known to be working system?

My thoughts are:

- F-ed MBR
- Partitions not configured correctly

[Sir Tigger KC]

Turn it off.  Go have a cuppa. Turn it on again. 

[Kevin Wood]

It looks like it's trying to mount a partition on /dev/hda1 but failing.

I would say that there are two most likely possibilities:

1) The drive is screwed so badly that the partition is not even recognised.
2) The drive has been mapped elsewhere on the filesystem, meaning that it exists somewhere other than /dev/hda1, but the boot mechanism is hard coded to mount this location.

Most likely option is 2, IME, and it may well be that that the drive is plugged into the wrong connector on the motherboard, so try all of them!

Later Linux distros now assign a unique ID to partitions so they can be recognised regardless of where the device driver maps it.

Mounting it on another Linux machine, looking for the partition and then checking it / copying any required data off is a good plan.

If you need this system to boot, then you can provide a kernel command line parameter at boot time to force the location of the root filesystem to enable it to boot, then run an update script to configure your boot loader accordingly. It's not for the feint hearted, mind.

[Kevin Wood]

A few more points which might help him:

The hard drive seems to be basically working, as it has successfully checked and mounted a volume on what looks like an LVM partition at Vol/group/00 (although this might be on a different drive, of course). This is most likely the boot partition or the initrd.

Hard drives can appear at /dev/hd<letter> or /dev/sd<letter>, or elsewhere, depending on how the kernel device drivers identify them (/dev/sd devices used to be the reserve of SCSI devices but these days many IDE / SATA drives appear here).

It's possible that, although it's a similar motherboard, the drive has appeared at /dev/sda, /dev/hdb, etc. so the corresponding partition is no longer at /dev/hda1. This could happen because the motherboard firmware is different, the disk controller interface hardware is subtly different, and thus using a different kernel device driver, or that the HDD is plugged into a different physical interface on the motherboard.

Here's an article that gives some insight into how a Linux system boots and what can go wrong:

http://www.tuxradar.com/content/how-fix-linux-boot-problems#null

In order to sort this problem out the steps I would take are as follows:

Try booting the system with the drive in each connector on the motherboard to see if it works in any.

failing that:

Boot the system into Linux with a "Live" CD / memory stick or a rescue disk, on the target system.
Look in /dev and determine where the drive and its' partitions have been mapped
Try an fsck on each of the partitions to ensure they are healthy
Mount them somewhere and backup any precious data if required
If the drive mappings have moved, edit the boot loader configuration so the correct mappings are used at boot
If necessary, call a script to update the boot loader configuration (you will probably need to map your boot and root partitions temporarily to achieve this).
Try and boot from the original hard drive
Repeat until it works!