…and finally doing final editing on my New Atlantis piece, so blogging will remain light until then.

I’ve got a hardware problem of some kind.

I put in a brand new terabyte drive and installed Fedora 11 on it. As I was doing some package updates, the screen froze, just as it did yesterday, when all the trouble started. When I tried to reboot, it didn’t even recognize the drive as a system disk. I rescued it, and fsck said the boot sector was clean (I don’t know if that means no problems, or it has no data).

I did a full memory check overnight last night, so I don’t think it’s that. Maybe Carl had the right idea about a bad video card, but how would that cause it to trash the hard drive? Any other ideas?

For those following my travails yesterday, there’s good news, and bad news (and the bad news may be really bad). This morning, it finally logged me in, but it takes half a forever from the time I type in the password and I actually get a desktop. That’s the good news. The bad news is that I can’t find my old data where I backed it up yesterday.

I had backed it up to a file system on sdb3. But when I went to look for it today after logging in, /dev/sdb3 no longer exists. All there is is /dev/sdb1. And when I try to mount it I get the message “type lvm2pv not recognized.” Just how screwed am I?

[Update]

I’m hosed. Sort of, depending on whether or not I can find a wizard. Fedora decided, without asking me, to format both my drives as a single file system. The data’s still there, but not easily found. To top it off, the second drive is dying (which I didn’t learn until this morning). So I’ve shut down the machine, and am going out to buy a new big drive, load a fresh OS on it (without the other drives present), and then see how to go about the recovery. Fortunately, the data is redundant on both drives, which may make it a little easier to find, even with the superblocks and tables munged.

[Update mid afternoon]

In doing the new install, I’m pretty confident that I fornicated with the canine. It probably asked me if I wanted to format both drives, and I didn’t look carefully enough at what it was asking me. But Fedora started the whole thing…

Well, maybe that’s too strong a word, but my main work station (running Fedora Core 10) froze up today. I could move the cursor around on the screen, but nothing else. I ended up doing a hard reboot, after which it refused to boot, hanging after dragging the bar across the bottom of the screen. I’ve booted into rescue mode, but I have no idea how to fix it, because I don’t know what the problem is. I may trying to do a reinstall with the net install disk that I used to rescue, but I’m wondering if anyone has any ideas how to diagnose?

For those wondering, I’m posting from my laptop (which has its own problems, because the wireless isn’t working, and I have to find a place for it in my office where I can plug it in to ethernet).

[Update early afternoon]

I’m downloading Knoppix, because I’m having trouble with fsck from the rescue disk. It boots into level 3, though, so it may be an XWindows problem.

[Update a few minutes later]

No, it doesn’t go into level 3, it only boots single user.

[Early evening update]

Well, I backed up my data, and upgraded from Core 10 to Core 11. Whatever the problem was, the upgrade didn’t fix it. It acts just the same, except it says “Fedora 11” in the lower-right corner of the screen, instead of 10. It doesn’t complete the boot.

I guess I have to just do a clean installation, and recover from backup.

[Update a few minutes later]

D’oh!!!!!!!!!

I noticed when it shut down that it reported a bad line in /etc/fstab. I rescued, vi’d in, and noticed that I’d added a line to attempt to mount a remote drive, but had apparently screwed it up. This is the first time that I’d attempted a boot since I did that, weeks ago. So the screen freeze had nothing to do with the booting problem, other than it caused me to reboot. I deleted the line, and it looks like its coming up now. So I wasted a day on this. OTOH, I did do the upgrade, which I’d been meaning to anyway.

[Update a few minutes later]

Spoke too soon. It acted different, but it still won’t boot. At the end of the day, I’m still stuck with a white bar across the bottom of the screen. I’ll make one more attempt to look at the logs, and then just do a clean install of 11.

[Mid-evening update]

OK, I am officially infuriated.

I did a clean install of Core 11 over my previous Core 10. Everything went fine, except the friggin’ thing will not let me log in. I assigned a password for me (it didn’t ask for one for root), and when I use it, it just sits there. Forever. When I pull up a text window (ctrl-alt-F1) it asks for a password, then delays for a long time, then returns to a login prompt.

There are no words for how angry and frustrated I am…

Yeah, was busy today. We got up this morning and went to a range down in Pembroke to try out some 9mm guns that a friend had (the Glocks were nice), and then worked on the irrigation timer in the afternoon, changing out a switch and replacing a solenoid in the valve. For the first time in the five years that we’ve been here, we now have an automated system.

If anyone who knows CSS wants to make a major non-cash contribution to this blog, please tell me how to fix my stylesheet(s) templates to center the three columns under the header image.