UNIX for Beginners Questions & Answers

gull04 thinks that this might be serious so, from memory (and I haven't worked with SCO for some years) you could try the '-ofull' fsck switch along with the '-n'. If the filesystem is very large this will take quite a while to run but it may well tell you a lot more about any bad sectors (such as the inode number affected and therefore which file(s) are involved).

Probably worth a try. '-ofull' is sometimes an undocumented and rarely used option that tells it to check everything.

Code:

# fsck -n -ofull <filesystem>

I am willing to try the -ofull option with fsck, but today it's acting like this may be a hardware problem. Every time I have booted up with "unix.safe" and Single User mode, when I try to run the fsck command the system just reboots out of the blue. It is the same thing that happens if I try to boot into the regular unix or unix.old kernels, it just reboots almost immediately after trying to load.


Does this behavior sound like a disk problem, or could it be other hardware - memory, motherboard, etc.? Are there any diagnostic tools that I could try at the hardware level?



As for the suggestion to go virtual from gull04 - I would love to, and I have tried with VM Ware. I have a current VM that works, the only thing I need to do is try and get my USB tape drive to be recognized by SCO OpenServer installed on the VM so I can restore most of the /etc directory from my backup tape. So far I have been unsuccessful with getting the tape drive to work. That may be my next post...?

I'd be inclined to fully test RAM first. I would re-seat all SIMMs in their slots and/or download a bootable memory test iso and run that a few times.

Booting from CD/DVD directly into a shell doesn't normally involve a HDD to get the system on its feet.

Hi Spock,

I'd go with hicksd8, on the diagnostics although I'm still favouring a head crash on the OS partition.

As to the tape problem on VMware, depending on available HW you could always remote mount if you have an other bit of tin with the same USB I/F as the tape and copy to near line storage where you can copy the data in at your leisure.

Regards

Gull04

OK, this saga continues... I figured I would just start over with a brand-new hard drive and SCO OpenServer 5.0.6 installation from my CD, thinking I would then restore my tape backup and be on my way. The install went without a problem, and next I installed the 5.0.6a supplement CD for what I think is y2k fixes. That went fine, but then when I did a reboot after it rebuilt the kernel - BAM the same problem happened at boot up. It just stops shortly after loading the boot config, and then the machine restarts. Obviously now it is some other hardware problem, but I don't know what to try. I ran a boot CD with some diagnostic tools, and the memory test passed just fine. I think I might have problems finding replacement parts to start swapping out - this server hardware is at least 14 or 15 years old (which I know is probably my main problem).


I would love to find a way to get the data from my backup tape to the virtual machine I have working in VMWare, so I will pursue that route and will probably have some more questions. gull04 mentioned something about restoring to "near line storage" and then remote mounting, but I have no idea how to go about that process.

Wow! Hardware is that old.

Your reinstall issue has got me thinking. I've been involved with SCO since (seemingly) prehistoric times and I've forgotten more than I can remember.

I just feel that something in the back of my mind points to a BIOS setting especially the one that used to allow you to map video memory into RAM to increase speed. Can you just try toggling that? I can't even remember what the parameter was called back then; video shadowing and/or BIOS shadowing???? If it's on, turn it off, if it's off, turn it on. It's just something that I think I remember but could easily be wrong.

Well, now I have a bigger problem - or maybe the answer to what's going on all together. I had swapped back to the old hard drive, and straightened out the IDE cable and checked connections, just to see if that would help, and when I booted up it did the same thing. So I have another SATA/PATA converter card and I swapped, and this time the monitor came on with just a "white" screen, and now no matter what I try to get the server going, there is no video signal coming out of the onboard VGA connector. I think maybe that is what was going out, and now is completely out - would this be possible?


The Server board is Intel model SE7500CW2, and has a couple of empty PCI-X slots maybe I could try another video card - but would that even work with my SCO installation? I'm grasping at straws now.

------ Post updated at 03:16 PM ------

Update - spare video card plugged into PCI Express 133 slot 1 is working, but still not the total answer. Boot still bombs out after short try. I have tested memory, checked IDE cable and connections, and now I think I've ruled out video card issues. Any other suggestions? I don't know whether to mess with checking the CPUs or what else exactly I can check.