Thanks to Lisi and Sven for advising me on the use of fsck to check the boot partition. (I believe the –f option to fsck is *not* documented on the man page!)
After boot failure, I booted debian-live-500-i386-rescue.iso, and ran fsck on the boot partition: u...@debian:~$ sudo -i debian:~# fsck –f /dev/hda1 fsck 1.41.3 (12-Oct-2008) e2fsck 1.41.3 (12-Oct-2008) Pass 1: Checking inodes, blocks, and sizes Pass 2: Checking directory structure Pass 3: Checking directory connectivity Pass 4: Checking reference counts Pass 5: Checking group summary information /: 40679/2338336 files (0.5% non-contiguous), 251828/4674907 blocks I don't know how to interpret this output. Does it indicate a problem with the boot partition? Seven advised: "After you have checked the filesystem, you can mount it again and look for other problems." Query: What other problems would I look for, and what tools would I use? Thanks to all my interlocutors! -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
