[mythtv-users] System melt down

[Brian Wood]

Damian wrote:
> Brian Wood wrote:
>> Damian wrote:
>> <snip>
>>> What would you suggest I do from here? Doesn't look good to me, but 
>>> maybe it's not all lost yet. Not quite sure what's going on, but 
>>> hopefully I've given enough information to either shed some light or get 
>>> a couple of suggestions.
>> You should do exactly what it is telling you to do: run fsck manually.
>>
>> But of course you have to get to a working shell and minimal system to
>> do that.
>>
>> You could possibly boot from one of the live CDs, or one of the
>> pre-packaged rescue CDs like the "Ultimate Boot CD":
>>
>> http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/
>>
>> (site seems down right now though)
>>
>> Unfortunately such preparations for a situation like this require either
>> another working machine or having made such a disk ahead of time.
>>
>> Your MoBo's POST test is not happy, as indicated by the beep code. Most
>> MoBos have a list someplace (docs or online support) of precisely what
>> each beep code means.
>>
>> I'm guessing you have a failed hard drive, can you get to the BIOS setup
>> screen, and does it show the hard drive(s) correctly?
>>
>> If you can get fsck to run manually from a shell, I'd use the -y option,
>> or you will be typing "y" a LOT.
>>
>> Good Luck.
>>
>> BEWW
> 
> Thanks Brian,
> 
> I have a couple of working windows machines here so I'm downloading the 
> UltimateBootCD now.
> 
> Excuse my ignorance, but should I simply run:
> fsck -y
> when I get to a command prompt?

Not quite, you have to run fsck -y (filesystem to check)

In a simple case it would be fsck -y /dev/hda1

> 
>  From the motherboard beep codes that I can find, the one I'm getting 
> indicates a problem with the graphics card. That seems to not be the 
> case though as switching graphics cards produces the same problem, but 
> removing other cards seems to fix it.
> 
> I've started to have an idea about what's happened ..
> Maybe something random failed (sound card?) which caused the computer to 
> behave oddly, then the hard drive died because a file was copying over 
> the net when I shut the computer down.

As BW said, that would trash a file, not cause a hard drive hardware
failure.

Only on old Star Trek episodes does giving a computer bad instructions
cause hardware destruction.

> 
> I'll really have lost faith in Linux if that's what has happened. I lost 
> a hard drive to Linux a few months ago due to a power cut, and having 
> the trouble now potentially because of shutting down while a file was 
> copying. I know neither of those two things are great, but I've had the 
> same countless times on windows machines and never had such dire 
> consequences.

Please do not blame this on Linux, it is not the problem.

I'm really beginning to think you have a PS problem, as BW suggested as
well. The MoBo is also possible but I'd be astounded if this does not
turn out to be a hardware problem.

BEWW