I did two upgrades with the full DVD installation & both installed properly.
While I was doing an upgrade from opensuse 12.3 to 13.1 on my desktop we had a power failure.
When the power was restored I started my computer, (the installation dvd was still in the machine)
After the bios screen it asks me to insert a boot media & press a key.
I tried booting with the full version on a usb wich also didn’t work.
I burntthe rescue version to usb which has got me to the live installation.
I have installed my repositories with Yast & done a zypper update which went well untill I rebooted & removed my rescue usb
I then get the same menu at start up.(Please insert boot media & press any key)
I then checked how my partitions are mounted but don’t see a root or home partition.
bash: /etc/fstab: Permission denied
linux:/home/linux # fdisk -l
Disk /dev/sda: 500.1 GB, 500107862016 bytes, 976773168 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disk label type: dos
Disk identifier: 0x675e5be7
Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 2048 207670783 103834368 7 HPFS/NTFS/exFAT
/dev/sda2 207671296 213968895 3148800 82 Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/sda3 255932416 402733055 73400320 83 Linux
/dev/sda4 402733056 976773119 287020032 f W95 Ext'd (LBA)
/dev/sda5 402735104 767023103 182144000 83 Linux
/dev/sda6 767025152 976752639 104863744 83 Linux
Disk /dev/sdb: 2004 MB, 2004876800 bytes, 3915775 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disk label type: dos
Disk identifier: 0x40b3d911
Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sdb1 * 1640 1163263 580812 83 Linux
/dev/sdb2 1163264 3913728 1375232+ 83 Linux
/dev/sdb1 & /dev/sdb2 is the rescue disk.
linux:/home/linux # grub
linux:/home/linux #
GNU GRUB version 0.97 (640K lower / 3072K upper memory)
Minimal BASH-like line editing is supported. For the first word, TAB
lists possible command completions. Anywhere else TAB lists the possible
completions of a device/filename. ]
grub> find /boot/grub/menu.lst
Error 15: File not found
grub> find /boot/grub/stage1
Error 15: File not found
grub> root
(fd0): Filesystem type is ext2fs, partition type 0x83
Yast doesn’t give me an option & I can’t find a way to back up my files through bash.
linux:/boot # cd /grub
bash: cd: /grub: No such file or directory
linux:/boot # cp /boot/grub/menu.lst /boot/grub/menu.lst_backup
cp: cannot stat ‘/boot/grub/menu.lst’: No such file or directory
linux:/boot #
File manager under file system all my files seem to be in one partition which is marked as root.
Then have three empty unmarked volumes of 107GB; 187GB & 75GB as well as a windows partition.
1)Earlier on I saw a way to alter my runlevels but I can't seem to find a way to boot from level 1
2) The only documentation I can find that was of any assistance on fstab is in bash.
Is there a way for me to configure my bootloader & get my system stable?
Hopefully I will then be able to run the dvd installation & configure my partitions correctly.
That way, you should get back your grub-menu and enable you to restart your install of 13.1. However, since the installation procedure obviously was interrupted by the power outage in a somewhat critical point in time, your system may have encountered an inconsistent state. You may have to do a full OS reinstall to rectify that, but I don’t think your Windows installation in affected.
On 2013-12-16 18:26, dayfinger wrote:
>
> To me, it seems that caf4926’s excellent article on “Re-install Grub2
> from DVD Rescue” will be of help. You can find it here:
> http://tinyurl.com/97lwlbx.
>
> That way, you should get back your grub-menu and enable you to restart
> your install of 13.1. However, since the installation procedure
> obviously was interrupted by the power outage in a somewhat critical
> point in time, your system may have encountered an inconsistent state.
> You may have to do a full OS reinstall to rectify that, but I don’t
> think your Windows installation in affected.
Or try the DVD, boot, and choose upgrade. Might work.
–
Cheers / Saludos,
Carlos E. R.
(from 12.3 x86_64 “Dartmouth” at Telcontar)
Provided your DVD player was working prior to the power failure, this is starting to sound like a HW failure.
Questions:
When the power disappeared, did you power off your PC, or did you leave it as it was for it to power up immediately at the return of power?
Is your computer connected to a battery backup (UPS) or a power-line surge filter?
Why I ask is that when power returns, the power being delivered immediately after the power is returned often is “unclean”, full of spikes and maybe even lower in voltage than specifications allow. Power-line surge filters handle much of this, and UPS-es normally has such filers integrated. Some power supplies allow for major variations in this area. Laptop supplies are in particular known for allowing major variations in voltage as they often span 110V-240V to cover world-wide power lines. That allows for major over-voltage in e.g. the USA, and major under-voltage in e.g. Europe.
Also, note that many desktop PC power supplies are live even when powered off, feeding motherboards etc. to allow for e.g. charging MP3-players over USB even when powered off, or to power on by a keyboard hot-key combination, power-on over LAN etc. These power supplies are normally equipped with a second power switch that must be used to fully disconnect the power supply from the power grid - and that one normally does not switch off.
Leaving a computer powered on/connected to the power grid during power outage will allow line-power to flow through the power supplies prior to it being stabilized, which may harm on-board computer components.
So - if your DVD-player was working prior to the power failure and not now, that may be the case. If you have a replacement DVD-player to test with, do that. You may also have a DVD controller-card failure, which normally is a more involved error to rectify.
However, you do not need to boot off a DVD. You can transfer the installation DVD to USB flash memory as you did with the resque CD, and boot off that instead. Also, connecting an external DVD-player over USB might work if you have one available. That could eliminate a DVD-controller error too. If you have diagnostic SW available from your computer vendor, you should execute that to test your computer.
Completely agreeing with dayfinger. With one addition: even now, you should shutdown, switch off the power supply if available, unplug, leave for 20 minutes, plug, switch power supply on, switch computer on and check if you see the DVD drive.
My bet re. the install, is that you changed the BIOS diskorder, and installed bootloader + bootflag on the USB device. Instead of changing the BIOS disk order, rather use the Boot device option most motherboards have these days.
Originally Posted by dayfinger (https://forums.opensuse.org/members/dayfinger.html)
When the power disappeared, did you power off your PC, or did you leave it as it was for it to power up immediately at the return of power?
No my computer stays off, it doesn’t reboot when the power comes back on.
In South Africa all the electricity is 220volts AC/DC.
I don’t have a UPS but all my electronic equipment is run through surge protectors.
Originally Posted by knurpht
My bet re. the install, is that you changed the BIOS diskorder, and installed bootloader + bootflag on the USB device. Instead of changing the BIOS disk order, rather use the Boot device option most motherboards have these days.
If I can remember correctly I thing I did tick a box named bootflag somewhere when I either downloaded or burnt the disk.
> If I can remember correctly I thing I did tick a box named bootflag
> somewhere when I either downloaded or burnt the disk.
What? Then you did incorrectly, the image has to be burnt raw, directly.
You can not add anything. If the software says it can add something,
even a flag, you are in the wrong software or wrong dialog.
Read the instruction link from the opensuse.org download page, nowhere else.
–
Cheers / Saludos,
Carlos E. R.
(from 12.3 x86_64 “Dartmouth” at Telcontar)
Good. Then you may not have a DVD device failure after all - is this attempt made using DVD, perhaps, or did you use your USB flash?
There’s no /dev on /dev/sda3. Are you shure your root / is on sda3? Try the same command with the others too (sda5, sda6) and see if you have better success with them. If you used default openSUSE suggestions when partitioning, chances are that sda3 is the swap partition. You can execute mount-commands to the same mount point back-to-back without worries. Just type mount-commands until you have success here. The last mount command always win.
That’s correct. Your problem seems to be the mount-commands, not xfce. But use the Desktop Environment you are comfortable with. caf4926’s instructions are pretty universal and should work as long as you have a terminal-window available, boot from an external medium AND there is a valid Linux root-structure on the disks to be processed. There must be some relevance between the two Linux versions too, but I am not sure how much deviation is tolerated. E.g. you cannot mix 32bit and 64bit architectures between the two Linuxes (as caf4926’s instrutions clearly states). Identical versions are obviously the best, and the only one guaranteed to work.
Simply put, what caf4946 instructs you to do, is to boot an external Linux (since your Linux doesn’t boot as you want) then make your on-disk Linux the current structure afterwards (that’s the mounting of your on-disk root structure followed by the chroot) to make the Grub reinstall procedure execute so it reads from the proper sources (your Linux/disk) and writes to the proper target (also your Linux/disk) instead of whatever the external Linux (on CD/DVD/USB) would instruct Grub reinstall to do.