[TAG] Flaky system

[Neil Youngman]

On Wednesday 19 Oct 2005 09:02, Neil Youngman wrote:
> My main system has come over all flaky this morning
>
> Symptoms:
> ifup won't bring up eth0 (No networking problems in win98)
> On boot it generates a bunch of messages about hda9 not having a valid
> FAT filesystem and not having a valid NTFS filesystem.
> On one boot it had lost the system time
> On another boot I had to reset the HDD details in the BIOS to get it to
> boot On the most recent boot it complained about unknown filesystem type
> 'supermount'
>
> Given the diversity of problems I wonder if there is a major hardware
> problem underlying some of the symptoms?

It seems to have been a pair of problems occurring together. 

There appears to be a known issue with Mepis and Debian whereby an upgrade of 
the hwdata package results in a loss of sound and ethernet detection. At 
roughly the same time as this happened on my system, my BIOS settings were 
lost for no apparent reason. It may have been a battery problem, but as it 
hasn't recurred despite the system being powered down for a week it may have 
just been a glitch.

The 2 problems occurring together made it look as though the system was in a 
bad way, whereas it seems there was very little actually wrong.

The BIOS problem hasn't recurred, sound detection solved itself and a simple 
update to /etc/modules (as suggested by Thomas) sorted the ethernet problems.

It did provide an opportunity to demonstrate how easy it was to continue 
working by booting from a Knoppix CD and spending the day running fom 
Knoppix. After copying a few key SSH and Mozilla settings it was very easy to 
continue working as normal from Knoppix.

Neil