Boot problems

Sometimes after the computer running Shurdix is rebooted, you may find out it doesn’t work. This happens primarily on unplanned reboots (e.g. power outages). This page was prepared to help you get it running again.

During a power outage, your BIOS (more precisely the CMOS) can be (partially) reset. This can result in two things that could prevent Shurdix from correctly getting up again:

1. PNP OS Installed will become set to yes, which seems to be the default value. On some mainboards, this prevents Linux from initialising the network cards. When in doubt, set to no.
2. ESCD reset. This may change the initialization order of the devices, and you’ll find your network cards “swapped”. Usually you can prevent this by using the HWADDR parameter in the network card configuration, which will rename the cards according to their firmware MAC-addresses. If you are in a hurry and the machine is screwed up in this way, try simply switching the cables (or if you have more than two ethernet ports, try one after another).

With current Shurdix versions this should only happen with broken hardware. While saving the config, a new file is created (shurdix-conf.tar.gz.new), then the old config file is renamed (to shurdix-conf.tar.gz.old). Then sync is called, and finally the new one is renamed (from shurdix-conf.tar.gz.new to shurdix-conf.tar.gz). When looking for the config during the boot, the files are tried in following order:

1. shurdix-conf.tar.gz
2. shurdix-conf.tar.gz.old
3. shurdix-conf.tar.gz.new

All these files are stored in the root of the filesystem that is supposed to work as a system partition, usually this is the harddisk. In case something goes REALLY wrong, the files may become damaged (if you have been paying attention, you’d notice they are tried in the order in which they are most likely to be correct). If this is the case, the system may even look partially working, but some things are broken, for example you can’t login. To solve this simply replace the damaged file with backups:

• either the .old in the same directory
• or if you have a separate backup (e.g. USB stick, another machine), from that one
• or if you backup to backup.shurdix.org, with the backup program or by booting shurdix with restore

Then reboot and wait.