Life with Linux: Hardware woes, a day in a life

An advanture in (literally) many pieces...

This morning, my main computer went bust. It hanged, and after trying to reboot it, simply refused to turn-on.

Taking the power-cord off, wait a minute for it to cool, nothing (not even the fans).

OK, it's a power-supply -- that's simple, I had a spare one.
Few minutes later (open the case, find the spare): Hmmm... the old spare has only a big flat motherboard connector. The installed one had also another small rectangular one. So the spare is older than I need...
No problem, a quick drive to a local store (and buy food for the cat on the way), leave 130 NIS (~37$) at the store and got even nicer PS (with big down facing fan).

Connected it to the MB, tested power-button, fans are moving, good, problem solved.
Yeh, sure... the PS is good, but the motherboard looks dead -- no beep, no signal to monitor.
Disconnected all disks, removed an unnecessary card, repeat -- the same.
So it looks like the MoBo is a goner as well.

Went to an even more local store (identity hidden to protect the guilty).
Asked for a replacement (for Pentium 4, 3Ghz), turns out it would cost 400 NIS (more than a 115$).
Maybe it's better to simply buy a new MoBo+CPU+Ram and have an upgrade? I've always wanted an Intel Core 2 Duo (yes, kvm here we come ;-)
The seller shows me several options. I insist on an Intel chipset (free drivers) and he tries to sell me an Intel board, with Intel graphics chipset (yay) but some obscure Realtek Gigabit adapter. That's not what I want. He tries to convince me that "everybody" use Realtek network chips and that it's my only way (I don't really like that).
He got busy with more important customers and I quickly went to the first store. Back to original plan (A replacement MoBo).
They only had a single model of those 478 socket type boards. Some noname with a SiS chipset (Oouuch) for ~300 NIS. Problem: this board has no Sata. No-Problem: they have a 45 NIS Sata/Pata adapter. The seller reminded me about the thermal paste for the CPU (an extra 10 NIS) -- all totalling 364 NIS (~100 $) including VAT (some 25% less than the first guy wanted for a similar Mobo).
Back to home, reconnect quickly. I don't have an extra connector for some old PATA drivers I had (Sata convertor occupies its location). Nevermind, they are old backups. I'll look at this later.
Test. Good. Now we are stuck in GRUB!

You see, due to the Sata/Pata flip-flop, drives changed positions and that killed grub.
That's should be one rescue CD away...
Boot old Knoppix (3.8.2) twice, no way, bad media.
In my CD pack I also had an old RIP, booted, it has "Boot to GRUB in it's menu" Yeh.
Doesn't work. Tested other menu item. Looks like bad media. Again? No it cannot be the drive. It must be old media.
Next is Fedora-8-KDE-Live. This boots OK.
As expected grub-install doesn't like to be run from the wrong root directory. A little more work:
vgscan; vgchange -a y VolGroup00; mount /dev/Volgroup/fc8_slash /mnt/root
Now chroot into /mnt/root, grub-install still doesn't like me. Nevermind -- run grub and from the prompt use setup.
Took me few tests to get this right (set the "root" directive, before "setup") but finally it's done without errors.

And you thought it would be that easy...
Grub boots the kernel... "No Volume groups found"....."panic"
OK, so maybe putting '/' in a VG wasn't the smartest idea, but what's the problem?
Could it be that my games with grub somehow thrashed the VG partition? cannot be.
Boot in a hurry back to Fedora-Live, vgdisplay shows everything is OK (Pheeeuuuu). Maybe the stupid machine remember this VG was somewhere else? Check with vgdisplay -- no, everything looks fine with the new location.
OK, another test -- vgexport and vgimport again -- that should erase all previous memories of old location. Boot again... Same problem. Few more flip-flops like that and than it hits me -- it must be the stupid initrd.
Yes, the error message wasn't during the kernel boot but shortly afterwards when Fedora runs "nash".
Boot again to Fedora-Live, chroot again, mkinitrd, boot again...
Now the stupid beast tries to mount /dev/root without any reference to VG's and panics right away. That's an improvement (I've saved the old initrd) since it proves this is where the problem is located.
Boot again to Fedora-Live, now configure networking and STFW a bit for more details. Looks like I'm OK, but some options should be passed to do it right.
I decide to go the easy way: chroot to the OS and rpmquery --scripts kernel to see how the post install script runs mkinitrd. Well, they do it via new-kernel-pkg.
Now that's nice:
new-kernel-pkg --mkinitrd --depmod --update 2.6.24.3-34.fc8
Boot to an almost working OS.

Network won't come up because /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0 bind the interface to the HWADDR -- fix it (and I maintain also /etc/ethers, so fix it as well).
Update time on the MoBo -- I did during one of the boots to Fedora-Live: system-config-date, select the timezone, exit and then
ntpdate 0.fedora.pool.ntp.org; hwclock -u -w
No swap. The swap used to be on one of the old PATA devices I had. The main VG is full, but its physical disk is not, so: fdisk, create new partition, another VG (bad for performance, but who cares now...), a new LV in this VG, mkswap, update /etc/fstab and we are done.
Audio: system-config-soundcard does not know to unload the previous intel drivers (who loaded them anyway? maybe /etc/modprobe.conf, but they are not there anymore). An easy one -- fuser /dev/snd/*, kill them all (pulseaudio, arts, amarok, kmix), rmmod recursively like an idiot (rmmod/modprobe could have a usefull recursive option...). Rerun system-config-soundcard. No sound. Easy. Speaker cable was out. Still no sound. Easy. Mixers were at zero volume. Now everything is good.

Root partition in a VG comes with some complexities (and some conveniences as well).

That's all folks, it's been a long day.

Life with Linux