[ale] Boot issue coming back again

Michael H. Warfield mhw at WittsEnd.com
Tue Dec 7 16:17:55 EST 2010


On Tue, 2010-12-07 at 15:44 -0500, Narahari 'n' Savitha wrote:
> Oops.  Made a mistake in my typing.

> Instead of I connected the NTFS drive by itself, it should read I
> connected
> the NON-NTFS drive by itself.

Ah...  Makes a big difference.

I think I had some suggestions in an earlier posting.

What are the make, model, and interface of these drives?

Can you burn an NST minimal CD and boot it?

http://www.networksecuritytoolkit.org

Advantage to this toolkit is that it's designed to be complete unto
itself as a run-live and be able to do forensic work and analytical work
that could involve tearing into an unknown drive or hardware.

Try booting it to console or server mode.

If you can't boot it I would love to know how far you got.

If you can (there will be no graphical interface on the minimal) then
you can log in and run some tests and post the results.

cat /proc/cpuinfo
cat /proc/partitions
sfdisk -l /dev/sda
sfdisk -R /dev/sda (this forces a partition table reread)
cat /proc/partitions (it's possible that this might be different now)
smartctl -i /dev/sda
hdparm /dev/sda
sdparm /dev/sda

You can save those off to a USB drive so you're not retyping everything.

This won't solve it but it could go a long way toward figuring out what
it is.

Regards,
Mike
> 
> On Tue, Dec 7, 2010 at 9:26 AM, Narahari 'n' Savitha
> <savithari at gmail.com>wrote:
> 
> > Friends:
> >
> > The title of this was
> > Boot issues - OR - why Mafia$oft hurts/disappoints everyone
> endlessly
> > Its time to provide update on where I am on the
> Ubuntu/Kubuntu/Ubuntu
> > Server/MythUbuntu/MythDora installs on the troubled machine of 2 HD
> setup.
> >
> > I removed both drives.  Then I connected the NTFS drive just by
> itself.
> > Installed MythUbuntu and all went fine (had some cd issues but
> finally burnt
> > one at 1X speed and got it to work).
> >
> > After install, restarted machine and went back to the infamous
> UNABLE TO
> > SYNC VFS UKNOWN BLOCK error.
> >
> > I then downloaded Hitachi's Drive Fitness Test cd and ran a complete
> test
> > of the drive to check for any defects.  NO DEFECTS FOUND.  So drive
> seems to
> > be fine.
> >
> > One more thing left, I will wipe the drive clean tonight and try it
> again.
> > I will also send the screen shot so folks can take a look at that as
> well.
> >
> > I may try DEBIAN also, but first I will wipe the drive clean.
> >
> > Any other suggestions would be appreciated.
> >
> > -Narahari
> > 

Regards,
Mike
-- 
Michael H. Warfield (AI4NB) | (770) 985-6132 |  mhw at WittsEnd.com
   /\/\|=mhw=|\/\/          | (678) 463-0932 |  http://www.wittsend.com/mhw/
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