Debian failing to boot after resizing /home partition

[Allophyl]

I used gparted in PartedMagic to resize my /home partition from 360GB to 160GB, and create a new FAT32 partition out of the remaining 200GB.

My /home directory only had about 9GB worth of files in it and as far as I can tell there was no reason for any of them to be anywhere near the portion which was deleted.

So the resizing and creating the new partition seemed to go fine. Then I rebooted and it got stuck while booting into Debian. Here are the last few lines it gave me:

Checking Aperture...
Node 0: aperture (at) 214000000 size 32MB
Aperture beyond 4GB. Ignoring
No AGP bridge found
Your BIOS doesn't leave an aperture memory hole
Please enable the IOMMU option in the BIOS setup
this costs you 64MB of RAM
Mappiing aperture over 65536 KB of RAM (at) 4000000
PM: Registered nosave memory: 0000000004000000 - 0000000008000000
Memory: 4059460k/4980736k available (2228k kernel code, 132280k reserved, 1081k data, 392k init)

I tried checking my BIOS for an IOMMU option but there doesn't seem to be one at all.
I also only have 4GB of RAM so I don't know why it thinks I have 4.75GB.
Can anyone help me figure out what's going on here and fix this? Thank you.

(PS. I kept getting a message saying I had to have 15 posts to be able to post URLs because of the (at) symbols in the above output. Might want to fix this.)

[oz]

(PS. I kept getting a message saying I had to have 15 posts to be able to post URLs because of the (at) symbols in the above output. Might want to fix this.)

No, there is no breakage... that's normal behavior for the plugin that has been installed to keep new users from signing up and spamming the forums. You can check the following thread for more information about the URLs issue:

http://www.linuxforums.org/forum/com...ng-forums.html

[Allophyl]

No, there is no breakage... that's normal behavior for the plugin that has been installed to keep new users from signing up and spamming the forums. You can check the following thread for more information about this issue:

I understand what its purpose is, and what I was trying to say was that suppressing that symbol in a post that has no URLs of any kind is going beyond that purpose.

[oz]

I understand what its purpose is, and what I was trying to say was that suppressing that symbol in a post that has no URLs of any kind is going beyond that purpose.

Spammers often use the @ symbol in their email addresses found within their spam posts , so it's purposely blocked by the plugin.

[Allophyl]

Alright then. In any case, do you know of any way to fix this problem?

[Allophyl]

By the way, I think the IOMMU message is a red herring. Other people seem to get this warning and are able to boot just fine anyway. I tried adding iommu=noaperture to the kernel line in menu.lst and those messages went away, but it still froze at the same point.

I've tried booting with only one of the RAM sticks installed. I tried that with each of the two modules and it still froze at the same spot both times. I also tried booting into windows but that just gave me a black screen. I could still successfully boot into the PartedMagic liveCD, however. When I check how much RAM I have in there, it seems to think I only have 3367196kB (with both modules installed)

I then tried clearing my cmos and booting it again, and I saw some weird behaviour. My system posted twice before proceding to GRUB and then froze at the same spot. When I went back into the BIOS I saw that it had somehow gone back to the settings I had had them at before. So I cleared the CMOS again and reboooted. I checked the BIOS and saw that everything was indeed at default values. I rebooted and it then posted *three* times before getting to GRUB. Again, it froze at the same point in the boot sequence. So I went into the BIOS again, and saw that *again* it had been changed back from the default settings to the settings I had had before. This time instead of clearing CMOS I reset the BIOS settings to default from within the BIOS. After doing this the change finally seemed to take and it was restored to default settings but it still failed to boot at that point.

So it seems like there may be some problem with my motherboard. I'd have a really hard time believing that *both* memory modules just stopped working at the exact same moment. But how on earth could resizing a partition have had any effect at all on either my memory modules or my motherboard? Is there any way to fix it, or is it likely I have to RMA it now? It does boot into the LiveCD just fine buit not the OSes on my Hard Drive. I suppose PartedMagic could have screwed up my HDD somehow but I don't see how that would have caused these other problems, and I doubt GRUB would work at all if that were the case.

So if *anyone* can help me, please do. Thank you.

[yancek]

The errors you are reporting are not familiar to me but I'm wondering about the effect of resizing your partitions. Can you post your partition information from "sudo fdisk -l" command and tell us what changes there are from what it was previousl?y

[Allophyl]

Device    Boot Start    End    Blocks  Id System
/dev/sda1   *      1     13    102400   7 HPFS/NTFS
Partition 1 does not end on cylinder boundary.
/dev/sda2         13   6540  52428800   7 HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda3       6540  71811 524288000   7 HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda4      71812 121601 399938175   5 Extended
/dev/sda5   *  71812  72662   6835626  83 Linux
/dev/sda6      72663  74144  11904133+ 82 Linux Swap / Solaris
/dev/sda7      74145  95493 171485811  83 Linux
/dev/sda8      95494 121601 209712478+  b W95 FAT32

Changes: before the partitioning, sda8 did not exist and sda7 extended all the way to the end of the drive.

The message just below /dev/sda1 seems troubling. But I didn't touch that at all. The *only* changes I did in gparted were to resize sda7 and create a new FAT32 partition from the empty space. And like I said, GRUB does still seem to work. I don't think it would if the MBR were messed up, would it?

[devils casper]

Parted
Boot flag is set for 2 partitions, /dev/sda1 and /dev/sda5. Size of first partition is too small. Boot up from PartedMagic LiveCD and remove Boot Flag from both partitions. Set boot flag for /dev/sda2 partition.

Post the contents of /etc/fstab file here.

[Allophyl]

I did try booting from the windows 7 disk. I ran some tests and it told me there were no problems, and now I can boot into Windows 7 with no problem, but it still fails to boot Debian, freezing at the same point.

Another thing I should mention is that about 2/3 of the time, whether I try to boot from HDD or CD, the system just resets itself before ever reaching GRUB or the CD's boot loader. It seems to do this at random (sometimes it will do it 5 times before loading anything, sometimes it will work fine on the first try)

I tried doing what you mentioned: removing the boot flags from sda1 and sda5 and adding one to sda2. It didn't change anything at all. It still has the random resetting problem, still loads GRUB, and still fails to boot linux.

I also don't understand why you're so focused on the HDD. I didn't change *anything* that would have affected the MBR or GRUB at all. And I do not see at all how my HDD could be causing all of these problems with my BIOS randomly changing to previous (non-default) settings and the system constantly resetting when I try to boot.

Here's the /etc/fstab file though, in case it does help:

# /etc/fstab: static file system information.
#
# <file system> <mount point>   <type>  <options>       <dump>  <pass>
proc            /proc           proc    defaults        0       0
/dev/sda5       /               ext3    errors=remount-ro 0       1
/dev/sda7       /home           ext3    defaults        0       2
/dev/sda6       none            swap    sw              0       0
/dev/scd0       /media/cdrom0   udf,iso9660 user,noauto     0       0
/dev/hda        /media/cdrom1   udf,iso9660 user,noauto     0       0
/dev/fd0        /media/floppy0  auto    rw,user,noauto  0       0