Crashed - recovery floppy won't work

[bilzer]

On installed knoppix 3.1
System froze (keyboard, mouse) - I turned off machine.
Turned back on. System came up without kde. I logged in. Could not start kde. Tried to logoff.
Found shutdown command but couldnt get it to work. Turned off machine. Now when starting again (from recovery floppy or from harddrive) machine hangs on adding swap (which has been there all along).
What should I have done when the system froze?
How do I start kde if the system comes up without it?

I could reinstall now, but I'm concerned should this happen later after I've added a lot to the systme. ( I do back up /etc and /home but hadnt done that yet for this system)
Thanks for any help

[rickenbacherus]

One of the primary functions of the Knoppix live bootable cd is recovery right? :P

[audioaficionado]

One of the primary functions of the Knoppix live bootable cd is recovery right? :P

Yeah just boot up with the CD, look over the config files and chroot into the HD installation.

[bilzer]

Thanks for the replies.
Ive used Caldera and Mandrake so am familiar with linux but I would appreciate a bit more detail of what you say. Here's what I tried:
Booted up with knoppix cd.
My knoppix is installed on hd hdc3.
I cntl-alt-f1 to root.
mount /mnt/hdc3
chroot /mnt/hdc3
login knoppix
passwd: entered password - not accepted (I know its ok - have used it repeatedly)
Tried several times, also to login to root -- times out after 60 seconds.
Am I on the right track??

[rickenbacherus]

On installed knoppix 3.1
System froze (keyboard, mouse) - I turned off machine.
Turned back on. System came up without kde. I logged in. Could not start kde. Tried to logoff.
Found shutdown command but couldnt get it to work. Turned off machine. Now when starting again (from recovery floppy or from harddrive) machine hangs on adding swap (which has been there all along).
What should I have done when the system froze?

I certainly can't say I've never had a system freeze but more often than not Linux will recover- just give it a moment. Realize that what usually crashes is X and not Linux.

How do I start kde if the system comes up without it?

startx

Boot the Knoppix disc->
knoppix 2
root
<pwd>
mount /dev/hda? /mnt/hda?
mcedit /mnt/hda?/var/log/syslog

You could also just chroot over to /mnt/hda? if you want to.

Have a look- take your time- see what there is to see. Forget all you ever learned about logs and messages from wimpdoze and look at what Linux will tell you. The answers are very often times there to be found. Always enter errors into google.com/linux - there are hundreds (thousands?) of mailing lists that get searched as well.

A quick something to try would be to reformat the swap file.
When an OS (yes any OS) is interrupted during a write operation (and that's of course what a swap file does) it can leave all sorts of weird things dropped in various places on the disk in a drunken gi fashion (my apologies to the drunks who are not gi's). Since it hangs on the swap file it wouldn't hurt to eliminate that as a possibility right?

How have you formatted your hdd(s)? What filesystems that is.

edit
Forgot to tell you to mount the hard drive! Of course you can always boot completely into KDE and do it from there much more comfortably I suppose. I prefer the CLI as it is much faster.

[bilzer]

Thanks for your replies.
Swap file is same as I'm using on Mandrake 9.l ok
(trying to decide which to use to replace Man 8.1)
I couldnt get the knoppix disk to get me back to the installed knoppix so I re-installed it, then backed up /etc and /home with my settings.
Knoppix is the easiest distro to install I've had yet.
Perhaps the system wasn't stalled as I thought since after the backup (with tar) the mouse and keyboard slowed badly, and shutdown took a very long time and I just waited it out. On restart speed is ok.
My machine is 330mb ram with 300 speed and I'm using usb2 - swap is 130mb - I have about 740mb free on the hard disk - perhaps this machine doesnt have power for knoppix?