Puppy Pooped on Win2k HD-0? (Nope, hardware failed)

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DaveKBV
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Puppy Pooped on Win2k HD-0? (Nope, hardware failed)

#1 Post by DaveKBV »

A wee problemete...

After playing with Puppy Linux, 1.0.5 Including installing the unoffical 105 update, and it's patch (sweet download and install it has to be said) having got it working here on this PC, but having to use an external 2G drive on a USB/IDE cnvertor (impressed it did that!) Because it said the first time it ran, that it couldnt make a space for PUP001 on any local drive. But could use USB... After that, it all went well..

But... I find that I can no longer boot the PC off the internal H-Disk! The bios reports a disk "failure"...

OK, so I had to change the boot order to get Puppy to boot of the CD, but that is all, and I did change it back, but no, the bios reports the drives a falure. It also misidentifies it with a scrambled model number...

Has Puppy Pooped? Or did the 105 update put something in an odd place? Like sector zero of drive zero!...

This system usualy runs Win2k Pro with all the updates etc, has (had?) two identical HD's CDRW and DVDRW etc.

So, how did I place this post... Puppy of course, that still starts OK.

Ho hum....... Where's me backups, and win-install kit.... Maybe I'll examine the now suspect disk with the USB/IDE device, and another PC, see what happened....

Cheers All, any info, please post...

Ta. Dave. :cry:

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Flash
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#2 Post by Flash »

Without more info about how you had your computer and hard drive set up it's hard to say what happened. If you have a Windows 2000 installation disk, as a last resort you could boot it and run "fixmbr." That will overwrite anything in the boot sector of your hard disk with the default Windows bootloader. I wouldn't do that until we've explored your problem a little more.

GuestToo
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#3 Post by GuestToo »

did the 105 update put something in an odd place? Like sector zero of drive zero!
i wrote the 105 update, and it doesn't do much ... it just replaces a couple of files (in the pup001 file) with newer versions, and replaces a few icons that were removed from Puppy 1.0.5 ... it does not touch the hard drive at all other than that ... it's possible for a corrupted program to do something that was not intended, but i included rigorous md5sum checksums in dotpups, so it is certain that you installed a perfect copy of the original, or there would have been error messages and it would not have installed anything

it's possible the bios is still misconfigured ... Puppy should not have touched or changed any bios settings

it's possible something went wrong with the usb drive ... can you boot if you unplug it? ... Puppy should only have put 1 file on it called pup001, or pup100, something like that ... it is just an ordinary file that you can copy, paste, rename, move, delete ... other than that, it should not have touched your usb drive

you should be able to look at the files on the usb drive by clicking the Home icon, or click Start, File Managers, Rox Filer ... click the up arrow top left a few times, click the mnt folder, click the home folder, and you should see all the files on your usb drive

if your hard drives are ntfs, Puppy should not have touched them at all ... in any case, it should never read or write to your Windows registry, or any other file for that matter ... if you had fat32 drives, all Puppy would do would be to put 1 file on your drive called pup001 (again, it's just an ordinary file)

one thing that can and does happen, is the Windows file system can get corrupted (not by Puppy ... from a crash, for example) ... scandisk can sometimes fix it, sometimes it can't ... if the fs gets corrupted, it may eventally stop booting ... what happens is normal writing to a file overwrites a system file

did you mount the Windows partition when you ran Puppy?

DaveKBV
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Joined: Wed 12 Oct 2005, 13:47
Location: North Bucks UK

#4 Post by DaveKBV »

Hi..

Thanks for the reply..

The disk that may have been corrupted, is one of the two drives that live in the main box, on one of the IDE channels. The "Primary Master hard disk" as it call's it.

The other channel has the DVD and CD rewriters. As w2k saw them, C: and F: were ther hard drives (NTFS format AFIK) while D: and E: were the DVD and CD drives respectively. An unusual layout, but I didn't build it. It has run very well for the last few years, despite all the stupid things I do to it from time to time...

The Hard disk that Puppy was using, is an old laptop drive, that was on the end of a USB2-IDE adapter. Powered by the USB too. Puppy's boot CD was in E:, as the bios can boot from that.

I did not try to mount the Windows partition on either of the two internal drives, not least as they don't show up in the list of places to poke about in, in any of the Pup's file manager listings.

After shutting down Puppy (it does not dismount Pup001 on the external USB Hard drive BTW, complaining about that when booting later) And on resetting the BIOS's boot order, I find that it reports that one or both internal hard drives have "failed" (It's words). If I hit F1 "to continue" then it tries to boot the CD, then the floppy. Successfully if you feed it something bootable of course.

I have the original w2k setup CD's and startup floppy, and all the licence numbers, but find it odd that this should have happened at this time, as it's not the first time I've altered the boot order for some peculier reason or other.

The old 2Gig laptop disk (FAT32 I think) has the 256Meg Pup001 file, the old Win95 recycle bin, and nothing else. I just looked, by connecting it to this winXP laptop.

I'm about to move some cables about, and see if this usb/ide thing can access one or both the drives in the failed PC... Let you know...

The PC is a 1.8GHz P4, Phoenix Award BIOS, v6.00PG, with 512MB of Ram, and two NIC's, one 100MB UTP (the main shack network, with a router to the outside world) and an old 10MB thin ethernet card, to communicate with "other" devices. None of which are powered at the moment, or at the time of "failure".

I think that's enough info for now, well, as much as I can lay my mit's on at the moment...

I'm not blaming anyone, except me. Just that I'd like to know what and why etc, if just to avoid it again in the future. It won't stop me playing with Puppy (though I think I'll find a dedicated PC for it!) or from reloading Winderz, as I have an awful lot of Ham communications software, not least Echolink, of which there is no Linux equivelent, or at least one that will connect to the same service....

I also found that Mozilla will not connect to my office server, and use the remote mail facility on the Exchange server there. But that will be Seattle vs the rest of the world again... Just an asside. The sound worked OK though!

Till later...

Dave.

GuestToo
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#5 Post by GuestToo »

The old 2Gig laptop disk (FAT32 I think) has the 256Meg Pup001 file, the old Win95 recycle bin, and nothing else
that seems ok ... Puppy should use the pup001 file for it's file system (/root, /etc, /usr) and should not mount or write to any other drive or partition

it would probably think of your usb drive as /dev/sda1 (scsi emulation) and C: D: E: and F: would be /dev/hda /dev/hdb /dev/hdc and /dev/hdd ... typing mount in a console should give you this information

your drive might have been corrupted if Puppy was writing to the wrong drive, but it sounds like it worked properly, writing to pup001 on the usb drive ... Puppy should run completely in ram, except for pup001 (you also can boot it so it runs only in ram and doesn't use a pup001 file)

Puppy has some hardware informations tools ... Xproc and Usbview in the Utilities menu, and you can type:
mount
probedisk
probepart
fdisk -l

DaveKBV
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Joined: Wed 12 Oct 2005, 13:47
Location: North Bucks UK

#6 Post by DaveKBV »

Hi again...

OK, the pooch is off the hook!... :D

The IDE Main Boot drive failure would appear to be coincidental with my first use of Puppy. But in all honesty not to have been caused by the pup.

The drive seems to have a failure on the IDE bus interface itself. It fails to identify correctly to the system, and hangs the bus. If I use another PC (This XP laptop for example, as it has USB support etc) with the USB/IDE adapter, it reports that there is a USB device with a problem...

If I use the same adapter with the other disk drive from the failed machine (same maker, same model etc) that is recognised and all the contents is available to the XP machine, as an external drive.

For now, the main shack PC can only run Puppy from the CD, with the old W95 laptop disk on a USB cable, as you say, Puppy recoginses it as a SCSI device, whatever, it works....

The drive that failed is only a 2 year old Maxtor 30Gig drive, that spent 90% of it's time powered up and spinning, just like the one that still works.

Typicaly, I have 10 even 20 year old drives in other machines that have had all sorts of physical (and electrical!) abuse, and still work fine. So, when I get back from the works trip to the US, maybe with a new drive? It's out with the install/setup disks again.

Anyway, thanks for the help and advice, consider the problem solved...

I'll be back I expect, when I get round to making a dedicated Puppy Linux PC, where it will boot from the HD, but that's not for a while yet..

Cheers All...

Dave.

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Flash
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#7 Post by Flash »

I guess you could say that's the disadvantage of Hard Drives. They're the cheapest way to go, per megabyte of storage, and they are fast, but you lose everything on them when they fail. You might consider trying DVD multisession Puppy. Enough storage for most anything, but you can remove the media from a failed drive and replace the drive.

DaveKBV
Posts: 6
Joined: Wed 12 Oct 2005, 13:47
Location: North Bucks UK

#8 Post by DaveKBV »

Hi..

That's certainly a good idea. The DVD-RW drive though, is not that fast. Guess there could be a way to boot off the CD/DVD-RW, and use the HD as a temp store, much like the ram disk?.

During an extended period of incactivity, or on demand, it writes all the changes to a file on said CD/DVD-RW? Most definately need a UPS though I think... And a very ordered shutdown procedure.......

Horses for courses, I think there is a utility somewhere that allows you to mirror a couple of HD's in a machine, may look into that too..

In the, coug, 20++ years I've been messing with PC's, and the like, I've only lost 1 other HD of my own, seen plenty of other peoples go, some I recovered, but.....

I used to rebuild the old 14" things as part of one job, so have seen what fails, and why, close up! The modern stuf is good, but mad tiny clearences, so when they go, they go good (or bad, depending on your viewpoint!) In this instance, I think it's an electronic failure, so I'm hatching a cunning plan, once I've got the remaining good drive archived that is! But that's something to do in a week or three from now...

All the best, thanks again.

Dave.

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