[Techtalk] help!

[Akkana]

Katie writes:
> The problem: I can no longer get my desktop Linux machine (RedHat 7.0) to boot.

It sounds like some library images are trashed on the disk (for whatever
reason).  I'm not sure why it happened (kernel glitch?), but you may
need to reinstall or upgrade in order to fix whatever libraries were
damaged.  Do you still have a Redhat distribution from which you can
get the libraries?

> Win2K, which still works fine) I get the above error message.  Being an idiot,
> I never made a boot or root disk for this computer; I'd just assumed that
> PogoLinux had provided me one, but that doesn't seem to be the case.  So, I'm

You can make a Redhat boot floppy from either linux or windows fairly
easily: the short of it is that you get a file called boot.img (to
install from a CD) or bootnet.img (to install from the net) from Redhat,
and then you use dd on linux, or a dos utility called rawrite.exe which
you can download from various places, to copy that image onto the
floppy.  Now you can boot from the floppy and get Redhat's installation
program.  If this sounds like what you want, a google search on "Redhat
7.0 boot.img" or bootnet.img will get you lots of sources for it.

I think there are also images out there for "rescue floppies", but I'm
not sure how smart they are about recoving a possibly damaged file
system (e.g. can you get a floppy image that can run fsck?)  You
might be interested in the various pages that show up with a google
search for "redhat 7.0 rescue floppy" but it doesn't look like there
are any immediate answers there.

There are also rescue CDs (like the Linuxcare Bootable Business Card),
but I don't know of any fast way of getting one, and if your CD burner
on Windows is cranky then burning one isn't an option.  (If you go to
any Linux shows, like Linux World, you can sometimes talk the Linuxcare
folks into giving you one, though they told me they were going to start
charging a small fee for them soon.)  Linuxcare would probably mail you
one if you don't mind waiting a few days. :-)

I don't suppose you live somewhere where you might be able to borrow
a CD set from local chix or a local LUG?  (If all else fails, contact
me privately and I'll mail you something.  I just got my CD burning
machine back up and I'm a burnin' fool this week. :-)

> What do I do from here?  I have another Linux machine on the same home
> network running a different distribution (so that machine's boot/root disks
> didn't help), and when I boot Win2K on the problem machine, as I mentioned
> earlier, everything's fine.

One possibility if you don't want to reinstall but you're willing to get
out the screwdriver is to take the disk from the problem machine and
stick it in the good linux machine, then fsck it and mount it and poke
around.

	...Akkana