System Recovery

[Ben Scott]

On Tue, Jul 15, 2008 at 6:41 PM, Labitt, Bruce
<labittb1 at tycoelectronics.com> wrote:
> I don't have a problem with a fresh start ... except that I have
> no idea what really hosed me to begin with.

  Yah, me too.  If you're going to be wiping things clean anyway, you
may want to run some basic confidence tests on the system.  I suggest:

  Test the RAM.  Run MemTest86 overnight (with all tests enabled if
that's an option).  You can get bootable ISO and floppy images for it.
 It's also included as a boot option for some distro install CDs (I
know Ubuntu has it).

  Run a destructive write test on the disk.  (WARNING: This will
*DESTROY ALL DATA* on the disk.)  Boot a working rescue/install CD and
get a shell prompt, and then run "badblocks -s -v -w /dev/foo", where
"foo" is the name of the whole-disk device ("hda", "sda", whatever).
(WARNING: This will *DESTROY ALL DATA* on the disk.)  When done, check
the kernel log ("dmesg") for any I/O or disk errors.

-- Ben