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Re: Disk/file system trouble



On Mon, 25 Jan 1999, Uri Elias wrote:

> Two things happen now:
> 1. During regular boot I get:/devcua1  no such file found
Not too strange, provided it's '/dev/cua1' - apparently you did have some
file corruption on your filesystem, and this particular file got lost.

> 2. The screen remains dark, from time to time there is a flash of light
> as a failed attempt to write. When I press Ctrl-Alt-Del, the screen
> reappears and I see the process of shutdown.
Again, not necessarily strange, and perhaps related to the first problem.
My wild guess - your default runlevel is 5 (running xdm by default). Due
to the corruption of your f/s, some files essential for the well-being of
X were erased, and now xdm respawns endlessly and unsuccessfully.
The problem might even be that your mouse was configured on /dev/cua1, and
now you have no pointing device, which is a good enough reason for xdm to
choke.
All the above are wild speculations, however, as I don't have enough info
for more than that.

Please try the following:
1. Boot into single user mode, by appending 'single' to the name of your
selected image at the LILO: prompt. for instance, if you usually boot by
entering 'linux' at the 'LILO:' prompt, enter 'linux single'.
2. Look around for possible reasons for your problem. For instance - if
you do indeed enter runlevel 5 by default, you may try to run 'startx'
manually and see what the error messages are.

Hope that gives you a rough idea what may be wrong in your system. In any
case, sounds like you better start looking for a new disk. 
As for your question about replacing damaged files only - it can be done,
but whether it's a good idea or not depends on the degree of the damage.
read the rpm manpage, and look for information about file verification.
You can get a report about the integrity of all the files on your system
(more precisely - all the files that were installed from rpms).

Hope this helps,
Tuvik

--------------------------------------------
               Tuvik Beker
      P.O. Box 571, Givatayim 53104
Tel. (972) 3 5714436    Fax. (972) 3 5334349
         becket@shum.huji.ac.il
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