Knoppmyth is wonderful, I used it to make a MythTV box for my sister and we had it up and running in no time.

She lives in a different state, so she took it home, worked great, then a power outage happened while she was recording. The machine will not boot, and she tells me that the TV is very hard to read but it says something about "read only".

I assume she has to login as root and run fsck or something. I cannot get in from here to run ssh.

Any advice on how I can get her up and running? This is a real week spot in MythTV/Linux, that if you accidently yank the plug your entire machine is inoperative!

At home she has two windows laptops and she knows how to use putty. I don't know much about Debian, though I have been using Fedora for a while now. Is there any built in support for a serial console or something? She has the knoppix cd, so I suppose she could boot to a front end and then mount and run fsck through putty. would that work?

thanks in advance for any advice. And is there anything I can do to prevent this from happening in the future? Is there a different File system I should use that would not require any intervention in this situatoin?

Boot from the knoppmyth cd and check the drive for problems

fsck.ext3 /dev/hda1

The tip is credited to Cesman

Have her get a UPS/Surge protector that will shutdown her machine gracefully. I've found that APC's are the easiest to set up. This will (hopefully) prevent this from happening again.

http://knoppmythwiki.org/index.php?page=ApcUpsdHowTo

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Mike
My Hardware Profile