Mandriva 2007 does not boot

[bug80]

I recently removed my Mandriva 2006 installation and installed a fresh version of Mandriva 2007 (completely re-formatting the partitions).

The installation went fine, but now Mandriva won't boot! His last words are:

request module: runaway loop modprobe binfmt-464c (a couple of times)

And then the system hangs.

My system:

Dell Dimension 9150
Pentium 4 3.2 GHz
2 GB RAM

Any ideas?

[KenJackson]

I would boot with the CD again and go to the shell prompt (or boot one of the many live distributions or RIP Linux). Then look at the last thing written to /var/log.

You'll probably have to mount it, maybe something like this, depending on your partitions:
# mount /dev/hda6 /mnt
# ls -trl /mnt/var/log

You could also run fsck on the disk to see if it's damaged.

[bug80]

I would boot with the CD again and go to the shell prompt (or boot one of the many live distributions or RIP Linux). Then look at the last thing written to /var/log.

You'll probably have to mount it, maybe something like this, depending on your partitions:
# mount /dev/hda6 /mnt
# ls -trl /mnt/var/log

You could also run fsck on the disk to see if it's damaged.

Thank you very much for your quick reply!

I booted again from the CD and looked at /var/log. The last file written was 'lastlog', a file of 143 kB. It only contains NULL characters ("^@"), though. Files like boot.log were all empty (0 bytes).

Next, I used RIPLinux to run fsck on the harddrive, but according to fsck it is 'clean'.

Via Google I learned that the module binfmt-464c has something to do with 64 bit operation, right? I wonder, is my processor (an Intel Pentium 4 640) really a "true" 64 bit processor? Is it possible that it has something to do with that?

[bug80]

Ok, it turned out that the Mandriva installer installed LILO on the wrong harddisk. In the "install bootloader" screen I just pressed "next" without looking, I guess. So, Mandriva 2007 booted using the old Mandriva 2006 LILO, which probably caused some problems.

Now, it uses the new LILO. However, the booting still hangs at an early point. So early, that I'm unable to hit escape to check what is happening.

I rebooted using "failsafe" and then I see some errors. It looks like Mandriva is unable to mount the partitions on my SATA drive:

"Special device /dev/sda1 does not exist"

These are the contents of my /etc/fstab:

/dev/hdb1 / ext3 defaults 1 1
/dev/hdb8 /home ext3 defaults 1 2
/dev/hda /mnt/cdrom auto umask=0022,users,iocharset=utf8,noauto,ro,exec 0 0
/dev/sda1 /mnt/win_ vfat umask=0022,iocharset=utf8 0 0
/dev/sda3 /mnt/win_2 vfat umask=0022,iocharset=utf8 0 0
/dev/hdb6 /mnt/win_c vfat umask=0022,iocharset=utf8 0 0
/dev/sda2 /mnt/win_c2 ntfs umask=0022,nls=utf8,ro 0 0
/dev/hdb7 /mnt/win_d ntfs umask=0022,nls=utf8,ro 0 0
none /proc proc defaults 0 0
/dev/hdb5 swap swap defaults 0 0

Any suggestions?

[bug80]

Stupid, I could just try to remove the SATA partitions from fstab, off course

I did, and it didn't help.

It turns out that Mandriva boots in non-fb mode just fine. What does this mean (non-fb means no frame buffers, right?) and what steps can I take now to try solving my problem?

[SliGuy]

I know im a linux n00b but hav u tried uninstalling the whole thing and installing it on a seperate crappy old harddrive to check it works???