I'm over in Iraq so I have no access to my machine. My KM box is running the latest version available for d/l updated to latest SVN on about 9 June. I have 2 x 250 GB Hard Drives that are setup in an LVM configuration.

My wife emailed me last week that she was watching a recording and upon finishing backed out to the All programs menu which was blank. She knows how to restart the frontend by backing out to the fluxbox screen and choosing restart. This resulted in the same problem: no programs in the program screen. I emailed her instructions on shutting down the machine entirely which she did. Upon attempting a restart, she says the boot sequence looks normal until it reaches the following point:



She says if she leaves the machine running it will fill the screen with those two lines.

In the absence of anything else I've had her running Spinrite for the last 8 days; she doesn't really know how to interpret the results of Spinrite but is pretty sure it still has 320 hours (13 days) remaining. Since I don't know what else to try I'm asking her to leave that running for now.

Has anyone experienced this particular error before and is there anything short of buying a new HDD that can be done to fix it?

Thanks for your replies. I searched the forum and Google but did not find this exact error.

I googled a bit to see what the error means. I don't think it's anything good. Is there any way the Lilo configuration could have been altered before this began?

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Thanks for looking for me. I Googled myself and saw nothing good but also nothing definitive. The chance that any configuration was altered is about nil. The only way it could have been altered, besides drive failure in that section of the HDD, is if someone gained access to the box and did something malicious. I'm guessing it's just a HDD failure, but it's surprising that it happened while she was watching a recording and with no warning signs at all. Anyway I didn't think there was a miracle cure out there but figured I'd ask in case there was

You might be able to just reinstall lilo and have it work...

On the other hand I'd definitely be enabling/checking the SMART monitoring and doing other disk diagnostics.

Home your "out of town business trip" goes well and you get home safe.

How would I go about reinstalling lilo? Would that involve booting from a livecd and installing that way? If so it's probably something I can talk my wife through if the spinrite program doesn't fix the problem.

Yes. The wiki has directions under disaster recovery and "will not boot"

Roger, thanks. I'll look at it when I get back from flying.

This might be a good "upgrade opportunity" since R5.5 is now out.

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I thought I'd give an update in case anyone else has an idea that might help.

Through email and IM I've been able to walk my wife through the wiki instructions to boot from an install CD. The results were:

worked with no errors.

errored out. I couldn't get too many specifics because she's running from the tv to her computer and trying to remember what she just saw, but it definitely errored leading to

reporting file not found.

I bypassed the whole chroot problem by having her run


This time lilo definitely found the config file but still errored out with a "fatal error" message at the end.

I tried to bypass possible lilo errors by having her boot with the left shift key down and then enter

(She didn't type "boot:"; that was the prompt)

That immediately went to the previous error:



So now it seems like there might be something wrong with my kernel image. Is there any thing I can try before attempting to walk her through the process to upgrade from CD? I'd rather not leave her without a TV until I get back.

Thanks for all the help so far.

Wow, if the chroot bombed that's a bad sign. All the other errors you saw tend to confirm it as well... At the very least you've got a corrupted file system, so chances of being able to make a backup are slim....

OK. here's what I'd try next.

- Boot from the CD
- Mount the root file system on the HD
- Mount some other "known good" file system, say a USB drive or /myth/backup/
- Try to copy the DB files from /var/lib/mysql/mythconverg/ to that other place.
- If that works try to make a tar file of /home and /etc as described in my backup info posting.

If you can't get the DB files it's probably time for a manual install (to leave /myth untouched) and then either using the myth.rebuilddatabase.pl script to get the recordings back in the DB or moving them under /myth/video/ so you can scan and play them back with that.

If you can get the DB files you should be able to drop them over a dummy install, make a backup from that, and then do an upgrade... Hmmm... thinking about that, you may need to grab the whole tree under /var/lib/mysql/ since I think it's the mysql schema that knows the layout of your tables... It may be easier just going the manual install route...