From: kfogel@occs.cs.oberlin.edu (Karl Fogel) Subject: shoelace works... but now sync is lost! help? Date: 3 Aug 1992 04:57:09 GMT
Arrghhh... I have installed Shoelace and it works fine, but now
the sync command, reboot command, and the shutdown command don't work. I
postulate a cause-effect relationship only because they stopped working
right after I got shoelace working and had booted from it for the first
time. (I had installed shoelace but with a bad bootimage previously; at
that time - before I put a good bootimage on - sync worked fine, as did
reboot (which is, after all, only a link to shutdown :-), although shoe-
lace had been installed just fine.) After I got a good bootimage for
shoelace to use and had booted from the hard drive for the first time,
sync and reboot stopped working. What they do now is this: sync hangs things
so that the prompt goes away, but I can still enter stuff at the keyboard &
have it echoed on the screen; only problem is that it will have no effect:
the return key becomes just a newline. Whoopee... The reboot command is even
worse: even the ability to enter keyboard input is lost; at least, nothing
is echoed to the screen. The system hangs totally, the three-fingered salute
is powerless, and I have to cold boot. :-( Control-C has no effect for
either problem, neither does ctl-z. :-((
This problem is most annoying, in that my Linux partition now has
"amnesia": nothing gets saved to the hard disk ever, thanks to write-caching,
so nothing I do has had any effect the next time I turn on the computer. I
am frozen in the state I was in the first time I booted from the hard drive.
Has anyone seen this before? Should I just recompile the sync and
shutdownroutines (I admit I haven't tried it yet, as gcc isn't quite working
yet, and of course it's difficult to install things when you can't write to
hard disk!), or has successful boot with shoelace somehow changed things?
Or do the gods hate me? I dunno -- if you do, please share your
knowledge with me. I'll remember you in my will :->
Thanks,