Is my computer dying?

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Sun, Aug 14, 2005 at 01:17:17AM -0400, Walter Dnes wrote:
>   Thursday evening I decided that I wanted to go from...
>   - 10 user consoles and one X session  (and kernel messages going to
>     console 12), to...
>   -  9 user consoles and two X sessions (and kernel messages going to
>     console 12)
> on my machine named "m1800" (1800 mhz speed... dohhh).
> 
>   This would accomadate Gimp editing digital photos at 1600 X 1200, and
> regular X usage (surfing, etc) at a more reasonable 1152 X 864.  To get
> rid of console 10, I deleted the appropriate line from /etc/inittab and
> rebooted, and waited for m1800 to come back up... and waited... and
> waited... and got "L 99 99 99 99"... etc. after the PCI device listings.
> 
>   After a couple of unsuccessful reboot attempts, I had a look at the
> BIOS.  The clock was correct, but the BIOS couldn't find my hard drive
> or my CD-ROM burner or my DVD-ROM.  I switched over to "m450", my "hot
> backup" machine, a 6-year-old Dell 450 mhz PIII with 128 megs of RAM.
> Let's just say that working on a 2560 X 1920 digital photo in Gimp is
> not "fun" on that machine.  Oh well, thanks to redundant backups, I only
> lost a few days of email.
> 
>   I've started looking for a new machine.  I downloaded and burned the
> Gentoo 2005.1 ISO, to be ready when I got the new machine.  I tried it
> on the "dead machine" and got various failures.  After a bit of screwing
> around with BIOS settings, I managed to get it to recognize the CD-ROM
> today, and boot the Gentoo install CD.
> 
>   The hard drive looked OK, I got the CHS (Cylinder/Head/Sector) numbers
> from "fdisk -l" and rebooted and entered them manually into the BIOS, but
> no luck.  I booted the install CD again, chrooted as per the install
> procedure, ran lilo, and rebooted... successfully this time.
> 
>   I'm sending this email from m1800.  Was that a "cosmic ray" event?  Do
> I trust it, or do I keep looking for a new machine?

You may have upgraded lilo at some point, and not rerun the lilo command
to update the sector map of the upgraded files, and then on next reboot,
things go splat badly for lilo.

Yet another reason I switched to grub some years ago.

Lennart Sorensen
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