Any help would be greatly appreciated. I have an Openserver 5.0.6 system
that has been running smoothly for years. This morning, an employee who
shall remain anonymous (not me), decided arbitrarily that the system was
running slow and should be restarted. He **did not** do a proper shutdown,
he just turned the machine off. Since this time, the machine hangs just
after "Verifying DMI Pool", and I never get a ":boot" prompt. I can, however
boot from a boot floppy by entering "hd(40)unix" at the boot prompt.

I have tried to restore the boot block by running the following:

dd if=/etc/hdboot0 of=/dev/hd0a
dd if=/etc/hdboot1 of=/dev/hd0a bs=1k seek=1
dparam -w

which did not change a thing. I then tried:

instbb hd /dev/hd0a
dparam -w

which also did nothing. Still no boot prompt from the hard drive.

Any suggestions?

Thanks in advance,
Steve

Steve O'Neal wrote (on Tue, Jul 08, 2008 at 03:21:22PM -0500):
> Any help would be greatly appreciated. I have an Openserver 5.0.6 system
> that has been running smoothly for years. This morning, an employee who
> shall remain anonymous (not me), decided arbitrarily that the system was
> running slow and should be restarted. He **did not** do a proper shutdown,
> he just turned the machine off. Since this time, the machine hangs just
> after "Verifying DMI Pool", and I never get a ":boot" prompt. I can, however
> boot from a boot floppy by entering "hd(40)unix" at the boot prompt.
>
> I have tried to restore the boot block by running the following:
>
> dd if=/etc/hdboot0 of=/dev/hd0a
> dd if=/etc/hdboot1 of=/dev/hd0a bs=1k seek=1
> dparam -w
>
> which did not change a thing. I then tried:
>
> instbb hd /dev/hd0a
> dparam -w
>
> which also did nothing. Still no boot prompt from the hard drive.
>
> Any suggestions?
>
> Thanks in advance,
> Steve

Fsck /stand? are the /stand binaries corrupted? (btmnt -w) I'm pretty
sure that if /stand is hosed, you will not see the boot: prompt.

--
_________________________________________
Nachman Yaakov Ziskind, FSPA, LLM awacs@ziskind.us
Attorney and Counselor-at-Law http://ziskind.us
Economic Group Pension Services http://egps.com
Actuaries and Employee Benefit Consultants

Steve O'Neal wrote:
> Any help would be greatly appreciated. I have an Openserver 5.0.6 system
> that has been running smoothly for years. This morning, an employee who
> shall remain anonymous (not me), decided arbitrarily that the system was
> running slow and should be restarted. He **did not** do a proper shutdown,
> he just turned the machine off. Since this time, the machine hangs just
> after "Verifying DMI Pool", and I never get a ":boot" prompt. I can, however
> boot from a boot floppy by entering "hd(40)unix" at the boot prompt.
>
> I have tried to restore the boot block by running the following:
>
> dd if=/etc/hdboot0 of=/dev/hd0a
> dd if=/etc/hdboot1 of=/dev/hd0a bs=1k seek=1
> dparam -w
>
> which did not change a thing. I then tried:
>
> instbb hd /dev/hd0a
> dparam -w
>
> which also did nothing. Still no boot prompt from the hard drive.
>
> Any suggestions?
>
> Thanks in advance,
> Steve

At that stage of booting you may want to check the system bios to make
sure it is seeing the hard drive. If it is a SCSI hard drive, make sure
the SCSi adapter is recognizing the drive.

Eric

Eric Nicholson wrote (on Wed, Jul 09, 2008 at 09:18:25AM -0400):
> Steve O'Neal wrote:
> >Any help would be greatly appreciated. I have an Openserver 5.0.6 system
> >that has been running smoothly for years. This morning, an employee who
> >shall remain anonymous (not me), decided arbitrarily that the system was
> >running slow and should be restarted. He **did not** do a proper shutdown,
> >he just turned the machine off. Since this time, the machine hangs just
> >after "Verifying DMI Pool", and I never get a ":boot" prompt. I can,
> >however
> >boot from a boot floppy by entering "hd(40)unix" at the boot prompt.
> >
> >I have tried to restore the boot block by running the following:
> >
> >dd if=/etc/hdboot0 of=/dev/hd0a
> >dd if=/etc/hdboot1 of=/dev/hd0a bs=1k seek=1
> >dparam -w
> >
> >which did not change a thing. I then tried:
> >
> >instbb hd /dev/hd0a
> >dparam -w
> >
> >which also did nothing. Still no boot prompt from the hard drive.
> >
> >Any suggestions?
> >
> >Thanks in advance,
> >Steve
>
> At that stage of booting you may want to check the system bios to make
> sure it is seeing the hard drive. If it is a SCSI hard drive, make sure
> the SCSi adapter is recognizing the drive.
>
> Eric

If that were the problem, wouldn't the BIOS complain "NO OS", or
"Bad System Disk" or the like? It wouldn't just hang ...

--
_________________________________________
Nachman Yaakov Ziskind, FSPA, LLM awacs@ziskind.us
Attorney and Counselor-at-Law http://ziskind.us
Economic Group Pension Services http://egps.com
Actuaries and Employee Benefit Consultants

N. Yaakov Ziskind wrote:
> Eric Nicholson wrote (on Wed, Jul 09, 2008 at 09:18:25AM -0400):
>> Steve O'Neal wrote:
>>> Any help would be greatly appreciated. I have an Openserver 5.0.6 system
>>> that has been running smoothly for years. This morning, an employee who
>>> shall remain anonymous (not me), decided arbitrarily that the system was
>>> running slow and should be restarted. He **did not** do a proper shutdown,
>>> he just turned the machine off. Since this time, the machine hangs just
>>> after "Verifying DMI Pool", and I never get a ":boot" prompt. I can,
>>> however
>>> boot from a boot floppy by entering "hd(40)unix" at the boot prompt.
>>>
>>> I have tried to restore the boot block by running the following:
>>>
>>> dd if=/etc/hdboot0 of=/dev/hd0a
>>> dd if=/etc/hdboot1 of=/dev/hd0a bs=1k seek=1
>>> dparam -w
>>>
>>> which did not change a thing. I then tried:
>>>
>>> instbb hd /dev/hd0a
>>> dparam -w
>>>
>>> which also did nothing. Still no boot prompt from the hard drive.
>>>
>>> Any suggestions?
>>>
>>> Thanks in advance,
>>> Steve
>> At that stage of booting you may want to check the system bios to make
>> sure it is seeing the hard drive. If it is a SCSI hard drive, make sure
>> the SCSi adapter is recognizing the drive.
>>
>> Eric
>
> If that were the problem, wouldn't the BIOS complain "NO OS", or
> "Bad System Disk" or the like? It wouldn't just hang ...
>

Most likely, but it never hurts to make sure.

One thing to possibly try off the boot diskette is adding the following
dparam...

# dparam -w
# dparam /dev/rhd00 `dparam /dev/rhd00`

Eric

"N. Yaakov Ziskind" <awacs@ziskind.us> wrote in message
news:20080708223000.A15507@egps.egps.com...
> Steve O'Neal wrote (on Tue, Jul 08, 2008 at 03:21:22PM -0500):
>> Any help would be greatly appreciated. I have an Openserver 5.0.6 system
>> that has been running smoothly for years. This morning, an employee who
>> shall remain anonymous (not me), decided arbitrarily that the system was
>> running slow and should be restarted. He **did not** do a proper
>> shutdown,
>> he just turned the machine off. Since this time, the machine hangs just
>> after "Verifying DMI Pool", and I never get a ":boot" prompt. I can,
>> however
>> boot from a boot floppy by entering "hd(40)unix" at the boot prompt.
>>
>> I have tried to restore the boot block by running the following:
>>
>> dd if=/etc/hdboot0 of=/dev/hd0a
>> dd if=/etc/hdboot1 of=/dev/hd0a bs=1k seek=1
>> dparam -w
>>
>> which did not change a thing. I then tried:
>>
>> instbb hd /dev/hd0a
>> dparam -w
>>
>> which also did nothing. Still no boot prompt from the hard drive.
>>
>> Any suggestions?
>>
>> Thanks in advance,
>> Steve
>
> Fsck /stand? are the /stand binaries corrupted? (btmnt -w) I'm pretty
> sure that if /stand is hosed, you will not see the boot: prompt.

Well, when I try to run fsck on /stand, it complains that "/dev/boot a
mounted filesystem, ignored"

umount /stand and then fsck /stand gets an error of "fsck: `/stand` is not a
mounted filesystem"
"fsck: could not get device for /stand"

I also tried "btmnt -w" and then "fsck /stand" with the same results.

I had limited sucess by moving the hard drive to the secondary IDE
controller, and it boots there, but then I lose the cdrom drive. Thought
maybe it was a hosed primary IDE controller on the motherboard, so I swapped
motherboards (I bought two of the same board when I put this machine
together several years ago just in case), but have the exact same results
with a brand new motherboard, so I don't feel like it's a bad conteoller.
When I install the cdrom drive on the primary controller, and the hard drive
on the secondary, it boots, but I immediately get a kernel panic and
shutdown. Remove the cdrom and leave the hard drive on the secondary
controller, and it boots fine again.

I guess losing the cdrom is not a big deal unless I have something to
install that is only available in cd media, but I just don't like things not
being right.

Sorry for being so verbose with this, and thanks so much for all of your
responses so far. Any and all suugestion are welcomed.

Steve

Steve O'Neal wrote (on Wed, Jul 09, 2008 at 11:25:22AM -0500):
>
> "N. Yaakov Ziskind" <awacs@ziskind.us> wrote in message
> news:20080708223000.A15507@egps.egps.com...
> > Steve O'Neal wrote (on Tue, Jul 08, 2008 at 03:21:22PM -0500):
> >> Any help would be greatly appreciated. I have an Openserver 5.0.6 system
> >> that has been running smoothly for years. This morning, an employee who
> >> shall remain anonymous (not me), decided arbitrarily that the system was
> >> running slow and should be restarted. He **did not** do a proper
> >> shutdown,
> >> he just turned the machine off. Since this time, the machine hangs just
> >> after "Verifying DMI Pool", and I never get a ":boot" prompt. I can,
> >> however
> >> boot from a boot floppy by entering "hd(40)unix" at the boot prompt.
> >>
> >> I have tried to restore the boot block by running the following:
> >>
> >> dd if=/etc/hdboot0 of=/dev/hd0a
> >> dd if=/etc/hdboot1 of=/dev/hd0a bs=1k seek=1
> >> dparam -w
> >>
> >> which did not change a thing. I then tried:
> >>
> >> instbb hd /dev/hd0a
> >> dparam -w
> >>
> >> which also did nothing. Still no boot prompt from the hard drive.
> >>
> >> Any suggestions?
> >>
> >> Thanks in advance,
> >> Steve
> >
> > Fsck /stand? are the /stand binaries corrupted? (btmnt -w) I'm pretty
> > sure that if /stand is hosed, you will not see the boot: prompt.
>
> Well, when I try to run fsck on /stand, it complains that "/dev/boot a
> mounted filesystem, ignored"
>
> umount /stand and then fsck /stand gets an error of "fsck: `/stand` is not a
> mounted filesystem"
> "fsck: could not get device for /stand"

i just tried this. what works for me is 'umount /stand; fsck -f
/dev/boot'.

You might also compare sum's output (taken from a 506 machine):

# sum -r /stand/*
33880 145 /stand/boot
57967 14 /stand/bootos
57967 14 /stand/dos

--
_________________________________________
Nachman Yaakov Ziskind, FSPA, LLM awacs@ziskind.us
Attorney and Counselor-at-Law http://ziskind.us
Economic Group Pension Services http://egps.com
Actuaries and Employee Benefit Consultants

"N. Yaakov Ziskind" <awacs@ziskind.us> wrote in message
news:20080709125605.B29175@egps.egps.com...
> Steve O'Neal wrote (on Wed, Jul 09, 2008 at 11:25:22AM -0500):
>>
>> "N. Yaakov Ziskind" <awacs@ziskind.us> wrote in message
>> news:20080708223000.A15507@egps.egps.com...
>> > Steve O'Neal wrote (on Tue, Jul 08, 2008 at 03:21:22PM -0500):
>> >> Any help would be greatly appreciated. I have an Openserver 5.0.6
>> >> system
>> >> that has been running smoothly for years. This morning, an employee
>> >> who
>> >> shall remain anonymous (not me), decided arbitrarily that the system
>> >> was
>> >> running slow and should be restarted. He **did not** do a proper
>> >> shutdown,
>> >> he just turned the machine off. Since this time, the machine hangs
>> >> just
>> >> after "Verifying DMI Pool", and I never get a ":boot" prompt. I can,
>> >> however
>> >> boot from a boot floppy by entering "hd(40)unix" at the boot prompt.
>> >>
>> >> I have tried to restore the boot block by running the following:
>> >>
>> >> dd if=/etc/hdboot0 of=/dev/hd0a
>> >> dd if=/etc/hdboot1 of=/dev/hd0a bs=1k seek=1
>> >> dparam -w
>> >>
>> >> which did not change a thing. I then tried:
>> >>
>> >> instbb hd /dev/hd0a
>> >> dparam -w
>> >>
>> >> which also did nothing. Still no boot prompt from the hard drive.
>> >>
>> >> Any suggestions?
>> >>
>> >> Thanks in advance,
>> >> Steve
>> >
>> > Fsck /stand? are the /stand binaries corrupted? (btmnt -w) I'm pretty
>> > sure that if /stand is hosed, you will not see the boot: prompt.
>>
>> Well, when I try to run fsck on /stand, it complains that "/dev/boot a
>> mounted filesystem, ignored"
>>
>> umount /stand and then fsck /stand gets an error of "fsck: `/stand` is
>> not a
>> mounted filesystem"
>> "fsck: could not get device for /stand"
>
> i just tried this. what works for me is 'umount /stand; fsck -f
> /dev/boot'.
>
> You might also compare sum's output (taken from a 506 machine):
>
> # sum -r /stand/*
> 33880 145 /stand/boot
> 57967 14 /stand/bootos
> 57967 14 /stand/dos


Well, it gets more interesting by the minute. Here's the output from "umount
/stand; fsck -f /dev/boot"

/dev/boot
Extended Fast File System: Volume:

NO PARTIAL TRANSACTIONS PENDING
16 files 16760 blocks 61986 free

Here's the output from "sum -r /stand/*"

33880 145 /stand/boot
57967 14 /stand/bootos
57967 14 /stand/dos
sum: read error on /stand/etc
00000 0 /stand/etc
14628 104 /stand/link
sum: read error on /stand/lost+found
00000 0 /stand/lost+found
32484 5 /stand/sfmt
13011 4137 /stand/unix
42901 4010 /stand/unix.install
42491 4120 /stand/unix.old
00418 4033 /stand/unix.safe

This says to me that there is a probable problem with /stand/etc and
/stand/lost+found but fsck doesn't seem to find/do anything about it. What
am I missing here? Any cure?

Thanks again for your help.

Steve

Steve O'Neal typed (on Wed, Jul 09, 2008 at 02:19:25PM -0500):
|
|
| Well, it gets more interesting by the minute. Here's the output from "umount
| /stand; fsck -f /dev/boot"
|
| /dev/boot
| Extended Fast File System: Volume:
|
| NO PARTIAL TRANSACTIONS PENDING
| 16 files 16760 blocks 61986 free
|
| Here's the output from "sum -r /stand/*"
|
| 33880 145 /stand/boot
| 57967 14 /stand/bootos
| 57967 14 /stand/dos
| sum: read error on /stand/etc
| 00000 0 /stand/etc
| 14628 104 /stand/link
| sum: read error on /stand/lost+found
| 00000 0 /stand/lost+found
| 32484 5 /stand/sfmt
| 13011 4137 /stand/unix
| 42901 4010 /stand/unix.install
| 42491 4120 /stand/unix.old
| 00418 4033 /stand/unix.safe
|
| This says to me that there is a probable problem with /stand/etc and
| /stand/lost+found but fsck doesn't seem to find/do anything about it. What
| am I missing here? Any cure?

Those are directories. I see that error on some directories here, but I
can't discern any pattern. IAC, /stand/lost+found ought to be empty,
and /stand/etc/default/boot should be a copy of /etc/default/boot.


--
JP

"Jean-Pierre Radley" <jpr@jpr.com> wrote in message
news:20080709195152.GB16575@jpradley.jpr.com...
> Steve O'Neal typed (on Wed, Jul 09, 2008 at 02:19:25PM -0500):
> |
> |
> | Well, it gets more interesting by the minute. Here's the output from
> "umount
> | /stand; fsck -f /dev/boot"
> |
> | /dev/boot
> | Extended Fast File System: Volume:
> |
> | NO PARTIAL TRANSACTIONS PENDING
> | 16 files 16760 blocks 61986 free
> |
> | Here's the output from "sum -r /stand/*"
> |
> | 33880 145 /stand/boot
> | 57967 14 /stand/bootos
> | 57967 14 /stand/dos
> | sum: read error on /stand/etc
> | 00000 0 /stand/etc
> | 14628 104 /stand/link
> | sum: read error on /stand/lost+found
> | 00000 0 /stand/lost+found
> | 32484 5 /stand/sfmt
> | 13011 4137 /stand/unix
> | 42901 4010 /stand/unix.install
> | 42491 4120 /stand/unix.old
> | 00418 4033 /stand/unix.safe
> |
> | This says to me that there is a probable problem with /stand/etc and
> | /stand/lost+found but fsck doesn't seem to find/do anything about it.
> What
> | am I missing here? Any cure?
>
> Those are directories. I see that error on some directories here, but I
> can't discern any pattern. IAC, /stand/lost+found ought to be empty,
> and /stand/etc/default/boot should be a copy of /etc/default/boot.
>
>
> --
> JP

True on all counts here. I am at a total loss here. I guess I'll run as-is
and hope I don't need a cd-rom drive. I may pick up another hard drive and
install the o/s on the primary controller just to see what happens. Gotta
find some free after hours time for that, though.

Server now bears a sign hanging over the power switch that says "Do Not
Touch". Hope it works.

Thanks toa ll of you for your help.

Steve