Motherboard died, can't restore

norenberg · #1 8th March 2011, 10:40 AM

Hi there.
Apologies for this but I'm a newbie in Linux.
I had Fedora 11 running and my old motherboard died but the HDD is OK.
So I just got another machine which is newer, and just plugged and of course it didn't boot.

So I went to the forums and google to find out how to rescue this and I just can see about reinstalling the GRUB. So I tried this, it shows up 2 options to boot Fedora, but it doesnt boot neither.

It keeps looping and restarting and it doesnt say why it's not booting.

I guess it's because the different hardware?

What to do on this case?

Thanks for any help.. I tried to search about it but didnt find any answer

giulix · #2 8th March 2011, 10:45 AM

Boot from a live media, mount your HDD, backup all important data and reinstall

jpollard · #3 8th March 2011, 11:47 AM

Actually, what may be happening is that your /etc/fstab is incorrect with respect to new device names.

This does depend on what and how your filesystems are identified in the fstab - either LABEL= or UUID= would work, but device names can change.

***DBelton*** · #4 8th March 2011, 03:20 PM

one other thing that may be causing your problem is video drivers.

For example:

Old motherboard had nvidia video and you installed the nvidia drivers, but new motherboard has intel or ati video. It would still be trying to load the nvidia kernel module so the result would be no boot.

I have found linux to be fairly tolerant of hardware changes unless you have gone in and forced it to use certain kernel modules. I even took a Fedora install from an old PIII system and slammed the drive into a P4 core 2 quad machine and it booted right up.

One thing that might help find your problem is if you tell us what your old motherboard was, and what the new one is. And any other hardware that changed as a result of that swap.

One thing that would be unfixable is if your old motherboard was 64bit capable, and you installed the 64 bit version of linux, but the new motherboard is not 64 bit capable. That would require a full reinstall to fix.

***Dangermouse*** · #5 8th March 2011, 05:28 PM

Add 3 to the end of the boot line in grub, that should get you a command prompt to remove the wrong drivers etc.. or copy important stuff..

norenberg · #6 8th March 2011, 08:13 PM

Thanks a lot guys!
The old mobo was an old via kt600 gigabyte (Athlon XP). The video card is an old AGP gigabyte that I couldnt find the chipset anywhere, its a GV N4C64T.
The new mobo is a Dell with Nvidia video card.

So, I will try what you suggested so far.
Just one question, if I try to upgrade F11 to F14, would that reinstall the whole system and keep the configuration and programs installed?

jpollard · #7 8th March 2011, 09:31 PM

Unless you upgrade from F11->F12->F13->F14, I think you will find that the upgrade will fail.

Skipping in between versions is not recommended as some configuration files may have changed... with the upgrade not recognizing the change.

You can certainly try it.. but have backups just in case.

marko · #8 8th March 2011, 11:18 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by DBelton

one other thing that may be causing your problem is video drivers.

You can append the word vesa to the grub kernel line at boot up, then the system will use the vesa video instead of the particular video driver. That might at least get you in to check it out. vesa is pretty much built into the guts of all cards as a basic fall back

norenberg · #9 9th March 2011, 03:33 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by marko

You can append the word vesa to the grub kernel line at boot up, then the system will use the vesa video instead of the particular video driver. That might at least get you in to check it out. vesa is pretty much built into the guts of all cards as a basic fall back

hi there, would that be something like:
append="video=uvesafb:mtrr,ywrap,1024x768-32@85"
??

or how do I do it. just input VESA on the kernel?

Thanks

---------- Post added at 04:33 PM ---------- Previous post was at 02:40 PM ----------

found how to put on vesa but didn't work. also emergency mode doesnt work.
I noticed it comes with "failed to read image" right before grub menu. would that say it's wrong image name or something like that?

I'm going to try http://www.supergrubdisk.org now and see how it goes...

norenberg · #10 9th March 2011, 04:13 AM

Sorted!
The problem was that GRUB wasnt installing properly.
So I manually edited menu.lst
it was showing something like #boot=/dev/sda so I took off the # and changed the kernel line from hd(0,1) to hd(0,0) and it finally worked.

Thank you for the help!

stevea · #11 9th March 2011, 05:04 PM

You were lucky. In many/most cases when you change hardware you need to diddle grub AND rebuild the /boot/initramfs file.

norenberg · #12 9th March 2011, 08:53 PM

probably not as lucky as I thought! it was actually on emergency mode. when I remove emergency mode, it doesnt boot anymore.
is that too hard to rebuild initramfs?

edit: weird.. now I removed quiet from kernel line and it's working again! but no ethernet connection, now I will figure out how to reinstall the eth