[PlanetCCRMA] (Slightly OT) CCRMA ate my machine!!

[Phil Moors]

On Fri, Mar 05, 2004 at 01:45:33PM +1100, Peter Howard wrote:
> Subject: Re: [PlanetCCRMA] (Slightly OT) CCRMA ate my machine!!
> From: Peter Howard <pjh at coastal.net.au>
> To: Fernando Pablo Lopez-Lezcano <nando at ccrma.Stanford.EDU>
> Cc: Planet-CCRMA <planetccrma at ccrma.Stanford.EDU>
> X-Mailer: Ximian Evolution 1.0.8 (1.0.8-10) 
> Date: 05 Mar 2004 13:45:33 +1100
> 
> On Fri, 2004-03-05 at 13:34, Fernando Pablo Lopez-Lezcano wrote:
> > > OK, not exactly true, but as it happened while playing with audio bits
> > > I'm hoping someone else on the list has experienced something similar.
> > > 
> > > I posted to the list a week or so ago about problems with fluidsynth
> > > connecting to JACK.  With the package updates yesterday I decided to
> > > update my machine (a laptop, Toshiba Satellite TE2000) to see if the
> > > problem was still there.  It was.  I noticed rosegarden had updated. 
> > > Interested in just checking the version, I started it with nothing else
> > > running.  The result? The sequencer crashed.  No big deal I thought. 
> > > Having checked the version (which is all I wanted to do and hadn't
> > > seemed to change) I started up JACK to go back to my "real" problem.  Or
> > > tried to.  Now I was getting an assertion on startup (either by qjackctl
> > > or directly).  I can't tell you what it is, keep reading and you'll get
> > > an idea why :(
> > > 
> > > OK, reboot the machine an see if it goes away.  I don't know as now the
> > > machine won't boot with any of the 4 kernels I have on the machine. 
> > > Each stops with "cannot open initial console".  And I can't get it to go
> > > any further.  Of course I can emergency boot from CD, but nothing looks
> > > out of place and I don't know enough as to where to start looking.
> > > 
> > > Suggestions? Pointers?
> > 
> > Ouch... I'm sorry...... I've never seen this happen. All kernels??
> > 
> > A bit of googling got me this:
> >   http://kerneltrap.org/node/view/1901
> > 
> > When in the boot process do you get that message?
> 
> No.  It just says "cannot open an initial console.", then sits there. 
> No panic.
> 
> > In the thread somebody says:
> > 
> > "make initrd manually after kernel image install and then run
> > grub-install, that should do it."
> > 
> > But I'm not sure what that would fix as I don't understand what is
> > really happening. 
> 
> Of course it may have nothing directly to do with CCRMA stuff . . . I
> did some googling too, but everything that I found was related to
> changing a _specific_ kernel. 
> 
> > What other messages do you see around the "cannot open
> > initial console" message?
> > 
> It's just the normal startup the last message before is the "freeing
> unused kernel memory" one.
>  

I just went through something similar with my laptop. My boot would fail
about halfway and drop me to a root prompt with an error message about
not being able to get a controlling tty. Running memtest86 found that my
64MB addon card had errors all over the place. My laptop is old, so
replacing the memory only cost $30. However, the problem still
persisted. I paved the harddrive and reinstalled FC1 and everything was
good.

Thinking about it, I believe that when my memory went bad it also
corrupted a bunch of files on my disk including some of the tty and pts
devices in /dev. I may have been able to restore operability by forcing
a reinstall of the dev package. By reinstalling the entire OS, I'm sure
that everything is okay.

Run memtest86 off a boot disk and let it run for a good while. Note that
memtest86 may report a false negative. In otherwords, it may tell you
that your memory is okay when it's really not. However, it will never
give you a false positive. If it reports an error, you really have bad
memory.

Phil