Last friday I had the same exact problem. I'll tell you if I guess a solution.
Cesar --------------------------------- wil <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: Hi, Sorry I have very little info on this...no logs or anything:( Running SID, with a custom 2.4.22 kernel, ext3 file system. HD was checked with the diagnostic utility from IBM, including surface (advanced) check and was fine. Did an update via dselect yesterday and after that the whole system has died. When i boot the process stops at INIT: version 2.85 booting followed by a blinking cursor. When i ran the upgrade the thing striking me as very odd was under "new packages to install" 'kernel-headers 2.5.x.x.' were mentioned. Not sure of the exact version anymore but it was 2.5 for sure. I think it was 2.5.99. I was kinda flabbergasted by that and saw no reason why those kernel headers should be installed...since i'm on 2.4. So i went back into the dselect selection 'mode' and set that kernel package to 'purge' so it wouldn't install. This gave me a load of 'xxxx depends on kernel-headers 2.5.x.x. ' like from gcc and so on. Struck me as utterly weird aswell cause my system never had anything 2.5.xxx kerlnel related stuff on it...anyways...thinking 'dpkg knows best' i let it have it's way and the package in question was installed. After getting the packages during install/configure something went wrong aswell but silly me didn't pay too much attention since this happens quite a lot with unstable and always gets resolved quickly...and never ended in something like i'm having now. Can't imagine the cause to be those kernel headers even if it's weird they were installed, but one of the 20 orso packages which got updated. An older 2.4.18 kernel does go thru the entire boot process but with may many errors mostly in the line of 'can't find /var/xxxxxxxxxx' After that i tried toms floppy linux to boot the system. mount /dev/hda9 results in just getting the'special device not found message'. And hda9 happens to be /var. fdisk shows hda9 as there and as ext3 but i think the complete filesystem went out da door on that partition. e2fsck gives me a 'the superbloack could not be read or does not....' etc..etc..etc. Any ideas on how to get out of this one?...and why this happened? Cheers -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
