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eCS won't boot

Started by OriAl, 2009.09.01, 22:49:45

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OriAl

Yesterday, I had some kind of problem with the electric outlet that the computer and my phone is plugged into.  Power stopped coming through it all of a sudden.  Of course, that stopped the computeer and everything else plugged into the UPS unit.  Then had a couple of flickers before it died totally (after the first interrupted the reboot), I had the power on the UBS turned off.  Turned it on an hour or so later, but still no power.

The electrician came this morning.  Naturally, the outlet had power, but he replaced it with a three prong outlet in case the problem was transient.  I had the UPS turned on.  Everything started, but eCS wouldn't boot after selecting it in Boot Manager.   Nothing showed on screen but a blinking cursor - normally, the files loaded in the boot process display in order.   I then tried to boot from the eCS 1.2 CD - no boot, either. - the eComStation 1.2 welcome screen  appeared, which is the first thing that happens, and that was the end.  So it isn't necessarily a problem with the eCS C: drive, but something as strange as not being able to print from Dos apps in eCS since I changed monitors to a widescreen (it's SNAP driver, and the Dos apps come up fine.)

Any ideas I can try to get eCS booting?  I don't understand why a CD boot wouldn't work.

XP booted fine (took forever, but it always does.)


Pete

Hi OriAl

As power failed it is possible that your eCS drive got trashed - possibly the FATs do not match. That could cause the hard drive boot failure.

Not sure why an eCS CD boot does not work though... Maybe something to do with the settings in the CD Pre-Boot Menu?

Ideally you want to boot from the eCS CD and run LVM. If LVM does not moan about mismatched FATS see if using CHKDSK /F on the eCS boot volume on the hard drive helps.

If the above does not help then I suggest you download a copy of the DFSee bootable CD  http://www.dfsee.com/dfsee/cdrom.php  and try to use that to examine the drive and rectify any problems. If, like most of us, you find that is a bit beyond your skillset then I recommend Registering DFSee and getting help from Support.

Regards

Pete

Radek

#2
It's worse. OriAI tried to boot from the CD - without success.

I suggest trying to boot more bootable CDs - any you can find around. This will make sure that the problem is with your machine (nothing boots) and not with the eCS CD and eCS installation (it's still possible even if rather unprobable). If it is your machine then it can be RAM, CPU or motherboard who has said you farewell. It can be a result of the blackout, or rather of an electric peak at the beginning of the blackout.

------

[Edit] Whoops, just noticed that XP has booted. Therefore, it does not seem to be HW. Another suggestion: boot the XP and check "Device monitor" and, if you have some tests (RAM, etc.) under XP then run them. Also, check BIOS whether it contains sensible data.

RobertM

I have seen those problems with failing hard drives. I think I posted this elsewhere though. I've even had the eCS disk fail to boot because of such (hangs on booting when it encounters the hard drive). I've seen systems where XP will boot (but takes a long time) while OS/2 doesnt. It would also explain why your printing is messed up - something else (on eCS) was probably damaged or lost during the reboot.

I also had a machine where the drive's media was failing, and all sorts of weird things stopped working correctly because of it (mostly ini related things, as either ini reads or writes (maybe both?) were not quite happening properly).


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Kirk's 5 Year Mission Continues at:
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Saijin_Naib

I may have to give Rob some support on this. It turns out the 40gb drive in my eMachines that would not boot 2.0RC6 has a SMART status of "BAD". I swapped that out for my trusty 8gb Xbox drive and now the eMachines is singing along with 2.0RC7.

OriAl

The power loss did trash my boot drive.  Today, for some reason, the CD boot did work.  I had to run chkdsk /F on the boot partition, and a couple of others. After I did that, I looked at a zipped backup of the boot partition (zipped from a CD boot), and compared it to the drive. I compared the remaining directories, also.  On the drive, all directories after NULL were gone, and in FOUND directories.  I copied all the missing directories, and missing files from the root, from the zip, prayed, and rebooted.  There was eCS.  It was this, or format and restore (or copy everything from the zip.).

I need a backup util I can put on CD (I actually don;t know how to do that.)  I'm still using Fastback, with Crash Recovery floppies.

Radek

If you have installed on HPFS then I recommend using PING (Partimage Isn't Ghost) - which I recommend to everybody here  ;D  It's a Linux partition backup/restore which knows HPFS (I don't know whether it knows eCS JFS). The utility backups only used sectors and bzip's them so that eCS installation will fit in an about 230 MB file. PING also knows USB and can backup/restore over network. It can also burn the backup on a CD "on fly" but you need 2 CD drives for it because PING locks itself in its drive.  If you will restore to the original partition placement then you don't need anything else. Download a (bootable) ISO image and make a bootable CD. You are ready for making backups. PING is a freeware.

Why I am so pertinacious with PING  ;D  It did a great work for me when I was unable to install eCS because of USB CD drive. I installed elsewhere and then ported the partition using PING and DFSee.

warpcafe

Hi Radek,

that sounds pretty interesting... and screams for creating a "How-To", here at os2world... :)

Regards,
Thomas
"It is not worth an intelligent man's time to be in the majority.
By definition, there are already enough people to do that"
- G.H. Hardy

RobertM

Quote from: OriAl on 2009.09.02, 20:43:16
The power loss did trash my boot drive.  Today, for some reason, the CD boot did work.  I had to run chkdsk /F on the boot partition, and a couple of others. After I did that, I looked at a zipped backup of the boot partition (zipped from a CD boot), and compared it to the drive. I compared the remaining directories, also.  On the drive, all directories after NULL were gone, and in FOUND directories.  I copied all the missing directories, and missing files from the root, from the zip, prayed, and rebooted.  There was eCS.  It was this, or format and restore (or copy everything from the zip.).

I need a backup util I can put on CD (I actually don;t know how to do that.)  I'm still using Fastback, with Crash Recovery floppies.

I would download Hitachi Drive Fitness Test and do an advanced test on the drive. It will not damage data on it, and the program is free.


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Kirk's 5 Year Mission Continues at:
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Fahrvenugen

Hi,

I've run into similar issues at times where a drive has become trashed.  Something that I always do when this happens is to re-seat all the drive connections - unplug the data cable from both the drive and motherboard, the power from the drive, and plug it all back in.  Then while you've got the computer apart pull out the memory and put it back (and if you're comfortable with doing it, do the same with your CPU and any PCI cards too).

The reason is:  If there is a power bump that causes just one electrical connection to have even a tiny arc, it can cause that connection to not make a good contact, resulting in a no-boot, or other strange things to occur.  Especially with an IDE drive, a single connection can cause the drive to attempt to boot, fail to boot, fail to boot from CD, and potentially get the HDD trashed. 

A power bump could cause a bad connection anywhere in the system where the connection isn't soldered.  By simply unplugging the connection and plugging it back in, it just causes that to become reconnected.  I've lost count of the number of computers that I've managed to get working by doing this after a failure.

Anyways, that's just a suggestion.  I'm glad to hear your system is booting again!

OriAl

I did have someone re-seat the cables and such.  The system is still booting, but it seems to be missing some things.  For example, no setup tab for Doodle's screen saver (I've uninstalled, and reinstalled), but no joy.  I'd like to boot to the eCS CD, xcopy /hotserv the current C drive to an empty partition (so I can copy it back if needed), format C, then do a crash recovery restore from a recent backup.  Should this work?

Thanks again.

RobertM

Hi,

xcopy /h /o /t /s /e /r

(/v optional for verifying - and of course specify the correct directories)

-Rob


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Kirk's 5 Year Mission Continues at:
Star Trek New Voyages
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