stuck at boot

Forum: HD Install
Topic: stuck at boot
started by: spinoza

Posted by spinoza on Feb. 05 2006,10:41

Hi!

I installed lsd yesteday and wanted my settings to be saved so I did a bit of trial-and-error with the lst file and uh.. that other file used for bootup.

Now the lappie wont even boot on!

At boot I get a couple "cannot find xxx" message, several "User "1" trying to respawn too fast" messages, then nothing. Every thing esle seems fine (usb detection, etc.)

I am currently at the hospital and don't have my liveCD or access to a cd burner. I do have a laptop, an internet connection and another compie that works.

Is there a way I can access some kind of promp at boot that would allow me to do some troubleshooting? All I could get is a "Alt + SysRq menu" with not much useful options.

Any ideas?

System is an old 366mhz 128 megs ram DELL laptop.

Posted by lagerratrobe on Feb. 05 2006,22:21

Bunch of questions.

Do you still get the other boot options when the machine is turned on, DSL 800x600, etc? If so, have you tried booting with one of those? After you get all the respawn errors, and all the detection of devices takes place, where do you end up in the boot process? What the "other" file you edited?

Posted by spinoza (not connected, too lazy on Feb. 05 2006,23:12

I edited the bootup file so I could boot in "toram" mode by default, also I tried some configs that I saw on this site so myDsl/settings/files/etc. would be permanent. I was working on getting the myDsl icons to stay on the desktop when the problem started.

The last thing I see in the boot sequence is a bunch of "cannt find xxxx" where xxxx is some system file, usually with "sh" in it.

Unfortunatly I don't get the bootup menu

or any kind of boot prompt.

Anyway, I'm getting out of hospital tomorrow morning so I'll probably just grab a livecd and re-install. Still, if you have ideas I'll be glad to try them later tonight.

Posted by lagerratrobe on Feb. 06 2006,03:51

I'm pretty well stumped too.

You may not need to reinstall, just boot off the CD and copy the affected files back in, although if you don't have many other things installed installed, a fresh reinstall might be the easiest way to go.

Best of luck.