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February 26, 2005

Ah... that didn't go as well as expected...

So... yeah... the server died on me, and I thought, "Hey, whilst it's down, wouldn't that be a good time to take all the bits out and put them in again".

So, I did. I also thought that it'd be a good idea to swap the video cards over...

Well, upon rebooting it was coming up with an error about not being able to decompress something and "Please append a correct "root=" boot option -- Kernel panic: VFS: Unable to mount root fs".

My pants went brown. Uh-oh. I've screwed the harddrive somehow. Arse. Arse. Arse. I tired booting into different versions of the kernel on the box and allsorts, each one giving a different error.

I then managed to get my Windows box back onto the internet by patching the modem directly into it and changing settings and what have you... so I could Google the error. Nothing much seemed to help me :(

So I pulled the thing apart again, removed the video card, and for some reason removed a stick of RAM... thinking it might be that...

Phew it booted.

I turned it off. Put back the RAM and it still booted. Strange things happened, but it booted. Now I don't know if it was the video card that was causing all those issues, or the RAM that was badly seated. I know I should have only changed one thing at a time, so don't preach at me. But hey. All works again now... I hope. Wonder how many times it'll crash tonight?

Posted by Ed at February 26, 2005 12:39 AM | Geek |