bad sectors
I have had some bad sectors on my root partiton for quite some time
dmesg would say stuff like
I/O error on dev/hda3
{unrecoverable} but the system would still boot. It's like
dating a guy that picks his nose. You look away at first, pretend
it didnt happen, I mean as long as the system boots who cares what
dmesg says. But you know deep down inside somethings got to give,
its creeping you out and ignoring the problem only prolongs the
inevitable.
On wednesday the system wouldn't boot at all, I back up ~/ every
night so that wasn't a problem, and most of the important system
files like xorg.conf, the kernel config, and exim config are also
backed up, but I don't have any backup plan to restore the actual
system instead of reinstalling. I put in a new drive but had to
wait untill thursday to reinstall. When I came home, as is my
habit, I first turned on the PC and then the air conditioner, right
away the breaker blew and for some reason my UPS didn't kick in so
during the boot up the system crashed.
When I tried to reboot it, the bios seemed all screwd up, first of
all it displayed the Asus logo which I remeber having turned off,
then it wouldn't boot from the cdrom, as it turned out, it had lost
that setting. So I thought, easy enough, I go into the bios and
reset everything to the way things were and reboot, but this time
it forgets the settings again, the bois refused to store any
settings at all. So I figured I have broken my motherboard.
I called up my friend Debbie who gave me the hardware and she met
me on friday with a new motherboard, an Asus P5VDX-MX, its a
cheaper one than the original Asus P4P800SE, but she said it should
work with my CPU, and to make sure, she also gave me a P4 3GHz CPU,
and for good measure, tossed in two 1GB sticks of ram, as she said,
"just in case". So once again I owe her big time. She also
suggested changing the battery in the old motherboard which of
course I forgot to do untll after I had replaced the
motherboard.
With the new motherboard, a fresh install went without incident, I
did note however that with the iPod plugged in, the partitioner in
the installer recognizes the device and makes it available during
the install. I was tempted to mount /usr there :-)
Today I had some time, so I wanted to get X up and running, I got
the nvidia packages with moudule assistant, it compiled the binary
without a hitch but modprobe reported:
NVRM: No NVIDIA adaptor
found! so I cannot load the nvidia driver. I am not sure why
the system thinks it has no video card, and not sure how to go
about making it see the video card so it seems to me a rather
serious problem exists. The motherboard supports AGP 4/8X so that
shouldn't be a problem. So the next step is to basically wonder
what the next step is.