200 MHz to the 'rescue' again.

[helen99]

Why don't I get rid of my old 200 MHz? Because it has never crashed throughout countless upgrades since I got it in 1993. Using it now to write this and check email. Everything else has crashed at one point or another (don't even get me started about the Possessed Motherboard of Horror that I bought a few years ago). The Debian box was probably the longest lived of all of them. Eh well, not giving up yet but it doesn't look good so far...

The 200 MHz is too painful to be a permanent solution, though. I need to get rid of it.

Comments

[helen99.livejournal.com]

Wellp, we got it running (sort of). It's not the disk (or at least some of the disk including the boot sector is ok). The kernel got dinged somehow (I think it's a software curruption rather than a hardware problem). We still haven't fivured out what happened. I'm able to boot up using a very old kernel. None of the newer ones work, nor will it allow synaptec to upgrade the kernel. But now I can get to the data, which I'm backing up slowly (I don't have an external hard drive so am using DVDs). Maybe I'll get an external drive tomorrow. We need to do more backups.

[aekiy.livejournal.com]

Well that's good news.. sort of. Wonder what would spontaneously cause the kernel to fail..

[helen99.livejournal.com]

We're not sure. I did some searches on the error message "Unexpected IRQ Trap encountered at Vector 78", but while I found suggestions for Vector 20 and Vector 0d, "Vector 78" seemed to elude me. There's probably a listing of vector codes in the Debian manual somewhere and what to do if an Interrupt Request Trap is encountered (There's this little IRQ walking along innocently, when suddenly it falls into a horrible trap!). For Vector 20, a forum advised someone to disable a line of code in .config. It's probably something very simple like that (something got dinged and reset to default which may not be the right setting for my hardware). The hardware seems to be functioning ok.