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Hi all, |
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|
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Please read this carefully. Don't take offense, I'm not insinuating |
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that you wouldn't. It's just that I don't want to get myself into more |
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of a pickle than I'm in! ;-( |
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|
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This morning as I was getting my son off to work, he got me upset about |
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something and I walked over to my laptop and instead of hitting the 'On' |
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button, I accidentally hit the 'Media Direct' button. (I'm explaining |
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the why so you won't thing that I'm a total airhead!). The laptop is a |
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Dell XPS M1710. The Dell Media Direct Splash screen display, but of |
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course, did nothing else 'cause there is only Linux on the laptop. |
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|
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|
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Anyway, this corrupted my boot partition, but I was able to fix that. I |
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just deleted the partition that hitting the 'Media Direct' button made. |
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It put this at the end of the hard drive, but it was made the bootable |
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partition and had a DOS/Windows partition type. |
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|
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I deleted the partition that hitting the 'Media Direct' button had made, |
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then recreated a new Linux partition with an ext2 file system and made |
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this bootable where the original boot partition had been. |
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|
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Then, I followed the Gentoo Handbook, doing all the relevant steps |
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except for downloading software that was already there. I chroot'd into |
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my environment to install grub - I did all the relevant steps including |
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chrooting into my own environment. In my chroot'd environment, I can do |
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an 'ls' and it reads the drives. I can also edit files like grub.conf |
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and fstab, so there isn't a problem with my remaining partitions after |
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reconfiguring the boot partition. |
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|
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I reinstalled grub, created grub.conf and ran grub-install and that was |
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successful. |
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|
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However, when I reboot, I get a garbled screen, but I *can* make out the |
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text, although barely. |
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|
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It goes through the boot process and gets to the point where 'Activating |
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mdev' is displayed |
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|
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Then, the following is displayed: |
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Determining root device |
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Block dev sda3 is not a valid root device |
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The root block device is unspecified or not detected. |
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|
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Of note and I'm not sure if this is where the problem is, is that when I |
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was mounting my partitions prior to chroot'ing into my own environment, |
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I got a message about maximal mount count and it told me I should run |
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e2fsck. I tried this and got an error message. However, my hard drive |
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is not ext2, it is ext3. |
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|
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I apologize for the length of this, but I wanted to try to explain |
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everything. I'm having fits here - I'm writing from my old 686 computer |
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which did have all my files on it. However, I ftp'd them to my webspace |
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and then back down to the laptop. When I did that, I deleted most of |
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them off the 686 and as luck would have it I didn't do a recent backup |
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from the laptop. I do have an older backup, but would lose some recent |
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files if I can't get my laptop up and running without a reinstall. |
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|
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Thanks in advance for your help. |
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|
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Regards, |
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|
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Colleen |
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-- |
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|
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Registered Linux User #411143 with the Linux Counter, http://counter.li.org |
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-- |
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gentoo-user@g.o mailing list |