Help: Hosed FS on HP nx8420?

From: Tim Wood <tlwood(at)iinet.net.au>
Date: Sun Jul 29 2007 - 22:40:57 EDT

I have an HP nx 8420 Core2 Duo T7400, 2GB RAM, SATA 100GB 7400rpm HDD, ATI X1600 graphic card, bought mid February.

I had great difficulty persuading it to repartition the drive. I installed the network edition of Edgy, bare system, then upgraded to Sid. The partitions:
sda1 19.75GB NTFS, sda2 52MB FAT, <sda5 ext3 (now ext2) 15.45GB as /, sda6 15.45GB ext3 /home, sda7 14.71GB Fat32, 16.9GB free, sda8 1.98GB swap> sda4 6.66GB Fat - WinXP installation files.

When I bought it I did not appreciate that it had an embedded security chip, which I now think the source of my problems.

On a reboot into WinXP a couple of days ago, it wanted to do some updates, so I let it. One of them was for the access to the security chip. I don't clearly remember now but I think I disabled the chip on the original installation. The update seems to have turned it back on.

When I installed Linux I used Grub in the MBR and it worked well, handing control to the NT loader, when booting WinXP.

On rebooting back to Linux after the above update, I was met with Error 13, from Grub, though initially I did not recognise it as coming from Grub. I won't try to go through the saga of the following 2 days. I booted Knoppix 5.1 and tried to chroot into sda5 but it came up with errors no matter what I tried.

I had amd64 kernels from 2.6.18/20/21/22 and the 2.6.22-1-686. I got to the point were several would start to boot but all end up with the sequence:

---

Begin: Running /scripts/init
Done:
Done:
Begin: Running /scrips/init-bottom
Done:
run-init /sbin/init No such file or directory kernel panic - not syncing: Attempted to kill init

---

An fsck came up with heaps of errors, cross linked files etc. My /Home partition shows no errors.
The basic root partition appears intact with /var/lib/pkgstates and dpkg/status.

If I could find a way to get it running I could re-install the packages (there's 1.5GB of debs in the archive). An alternative, if I could find a way to extract a list of installed packages, would be to re-install from scratch.

The machine has the capability of booting off a variety of media (I put the internal HD on the end), but will not boot off my USB stick or USB HD.

Any advise would be welcome.

Oh! I did have a backup from March, but somehow managed to "nuke" it:)

Tim

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Received on Sun Jul 29 22:41:27 2007