Rescue my kernel?

[mollusk]

Help!!!

I met a system corruption problem when my machine lost power. The “devfsd” daemon cannot run during linux boot process.

I installed Mandrake 8.1 on my machine and it runs well until today. I checked lilo.conf, and saw the default boot partition is linux, it looks like:

image=/vmlinux
label=linux
root=/dev/hda6
read-only
append="devfs=mount"

To fix this, I tried to change append to 'devfs=nomount', then I can successfully boot to runlevel 3. (Please read the discussion http://lists.debian.org/debian-powerpc/2001/debian-powerpc-200107/msg00369.html)

BUT next headache for me is that many services are not started corrected, such as network card is not up, and many other scripts cannot run. Before my system corrupts, when the machine boot up, everything is working, including networking, xwindows,… ;)

I guess append “devfs=mount” specify during boot process, the devfsd daemon is run automatically. But if I specify “devfs=nomount”, the devfsd daemon is run in the /etc/rc.d/rc.sysinit file. I wonder why there is a difference???

What can I do restore my system to the state before the system corrupts???

How do I make my devfs run during bootup???

Your help is greatly appreciated!!!

Thanks a lot!!!

:eek: null

[knute]

From what you say, I'm guessing that you normally start at runlevel 5.

What happens when you change to runlevel 5 as root?

$ telinit 5

[mollusk]

The network services cannot be started, eth0 is not up, (I doubt many other services either not started or not successful)

I tried to configure my network settings:

1. So I try to configure the network manually using KDE network config, it prompts me error message saying that the following services are not started, they are: apmd, atd, crond because the system cannot run /etc/init.d/function,

2. I do an ls under /etc, but did not find /etc/init.d directory, instead there is only /etc/rc.d/init.d directory, so I doubt there should be a symbolic link from /etc/rc.d/init.d to /etc/init.d,

3. I copied everything from /etc/rc.d/init.d to /etc/init.d, and now the network can configure successfully, but when I reboot, the same thing happens again, I still cannot connect to the network, the error message is: "connect: network is unreachable",

4. what is more, even the loopback address is not added to the network settings,

Before my system crashes, everything can run successfully, now it seems to me that I have to configure everything by myself. (while I am a newbie of Linux, this seems to be hard to me.)

Does anyone know how to recover my system back to its previous state? (I believe the only difference is that devfsd is not started during kernel boot process)

Thanks a lot :confused:

[mollusk]

I reinstalled Mandrake 8.1 and now the services are started automatically. But I the lilo depend must be devfs-nomount, still the same problem with devfsd.