Re: SuSE boot problems

[Al Hudson <nospam [at] york.ac.uk>]

On Tue, 18 Jan 2000, Keith Powell wrote:

> I'm having problems with booting SuSE. I have the full version of 6.3.
> For a couple of weeks or so, it was working OK. Then I started to get
> Kernel Panic error messages while it was booting and the process stopped.
>
> A few days ago, things got worse. Now I install it and when I switch the
> computer off and next come to run it, it won't boot. I get an error message:
> Not found any [active partition] in HDD. Disk boot failure, insert system
> disk and press enter. Doing this gives me LIL-, then nothing else. This
> happens whichever of the methods I use to install SuSE. Linux is on its own
> hard drive, on a caddy.
>
> My questions are,
> 1) Why has this started to happen with SuSE?

Dunno ;) If redhat is working okay, then it would suggest that the problem
is not hardware, but I would give it a bit longer before ruling it out. To
be honest, it sounds as if you have multiple problems here. The HDD stuff
sounds like a BIOS problem - just getting LIL coming up, for example,
suggests that the IDE HD has been switched from LBA mode to NORMAL. If
this means nothing to you, and you've not been in the BIOS recently, then
either there's a bug in there or you've got a dodgy HD.

> 2) What can I do about it to prevent it happening and to run SuSE?

Not sure really. If you're brave, you could try upgrading the BIOS, to see
if that works. Secondly, you say your HD is on a caddy - do you have any
spares? It might be worth trying SuSE on another HD to make sure it isn't
a hardware problem. Just because RedHat is running okay, I wouldn't
automatically assume that it's a SuSE probem necessarily. To be honest, I
can't really help you more than that without the actual error messages:
kernels panic for a number of reasons. If you have a HD problem, you'll
probably have seen messages about a corrupt free list, or ext2 complaining
about bad superblocks or something.

Hope this helps,

Alex.

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