unable to boot system! Why?

[Gregory Nowak]

I had a problem not exactly like yours, but with the same beginning symptoms.

I had just rebooted my server. As I logged in, the drive was making a whole bunch of noise, as if there was some big accessing going on. 
Also, when I was typing on the keyboard, speakup and the doubletalk had a bit of a delay in echoing the key strokes back, and commands took forever to execute.

Then I did reboot, and the system went through the post, but didn't boot.

I was also unable to boot from floppies or cd-rom, until I cleared CMOS, and reconfigured my BIOS. 
By the time I was able to boot from a floppy, I discovered that there was no partition table on my 2 drives which make up the raid 0 array.
It was as if I had a brand new drive.

Fortunately, I had a complete tarred backup of the server on another box, so for me, it was a matter
of getting networking working under zipslack running from a zip disk, and untarring the backup from the other machine to the server.

Hope you didn't have the same thing happen to you.

Greg


On Sun, Apr 06, 2003 at 07:43:49PM -0700, Igor Gueths wrote:
> Hi all. I recently was using my system, in fact I was working on some source code. All of a sudden, my system started slowing down majorly. I checked ps to see if there were any processes that were writing to disk, and I couldn't find any. Yet I still heard the disk being accessed, and the system kept on slowing down. I then powered it down and tried rebooting. However, the machine failed to reboot. When I did attempt to reboot it, it started printing endless strings of integers. And when I tried running lilo with the Potato rescue floppies, I got the following error: "lilo: error in loading shared libraries. ./Lilo: Symbol __cxa_atexit, version glibc_1.2.3, not defined in file libc.so.6 with link time reference. I tried copying the /lib directory from the rescue flopppy (root floppy) to /target/lib, and no effect. I still got the same error. And this box still will not reboot. And I do not want to install my entire system over again. Is there any way I can restore Lilo/all the libs without having to re-install everything? Has anyone encountered this error before and if so how did you fix it? Thanks!