Re: SuSE boot problems

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

On Wed, 19 Jan 2000, Keith Powell wrote:

> When it first began to not finish booting, the line where it usually stopped
> was: Kernel Panic. VFS error. (I think it went on to say that the VFS was
> not mounted). I hope that makes sense to someone, it doesn't mean a thing to
> me!

The VFS layer is the bit which talks to all the file systems: getting that
error is *very* serious. HOWEVER, it's not necessarily a serious problem -
sounds to me like you've just got lilo incorrectly configured.

> 1) Version 6.3 with YAST2 always gave the Not found any [active partition]
> in HDD error when restarting the computer. So after installing it, I looked
> at what fdisk (via YAST) was showing.

Setting a partition as 'active' means you're telling the computer which
one to boot from, not having an active partition is therefore a bad idea
;)

> /dev/hda1 1 3 24066 83 Linux native
> /dev/hda2 4 20 136552 82 Linux swap
> /dev/hda3 21 784 6136830 83 Linux native
> No error messages.

No, but an odd choice of partitioning .. .

> So, in my ignorance, this seems that my hard disk is OK, but of course I may
> be wrong.

I would agree this is a software fault.

> 2) By partitioning the HDD myself when installing with YAST1, it worked and
> would boot up OK, but every time it wouldn't go into the graphic mode saying
> that two files (sorry, I forget which ones) weren't linked. That was
> probably something I was doing wrong.

Sounds like an X config problem. Probably, the X server has not been set
correctly. Generally, what happens is that you choose your X server (say,
XF86_SVGA or something), and then a symbolic link is created to tell the
system which server to use. Sounds like that hasn't happened in your case.

> 3) I then tried installing the 6.2 disk I picked up at the demo week. That
> installed and would reboot, but every time I booted SuSE, it said that the
> installation hadn't finished as it hadn't sorted out the installation
> medium. It then went through the bit of choosing the CD and said the
> installation was complete. Each time I booted, exactly the same thing
> happened.

This will happen for two reasons. Firstly, a newly setup SuSE machine
starts running some scripts in the background. If you reboot the machine,
it stops the scripts and starts them again when you next boot. You should
turn the machine on, and leave it on until the scripts finish. They're on
one of the virtual terminals, Alt-7 I think? Sorry, can't remember.

> That is the situation so far. Sorry this is such a long message, but I
> thought the details may be of interest to someone.

Sounds like you've got a lot of different problems there ;). Stick with
SuSE6.2 if it works for you, give it time to finish it's work and you
should have no problems. That's one of the problems with SuSE - the
installer takes over a lot of the work from the user, but doesn't always
tell you. All it says is Have a lot of fun! ;))

Hope this helps,

Alex.

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