Re: After a few weeks of almost no issues, Wheezy doesn't boot anymore

On Thu, May 09, 2013 at 09:04:47PM -0400, Harry Prevor wrote:
> So a few weeks ago, I decided to install Debian Wheezy (then unstable)
> on a computer I built for my brother. The normal images didn't work
> for some reason now forgotten, so I had to use the unofficial
> installation images that included nonfree drivers. I had some problem
> (also now unforgotten) that made the computer take ~20 minutes to boot
> up for the first time, but after that Gnome 3 was working fine.
> Because my younger brother uses this computer and the free software
> drivers didn't do the graphics card in it (NVidia GTX 660) justice, I
> had to install the nvidia proprietary drivers as well a few days later
> if it matters. I pretty much followed the instructions verbatim from
> <http://wiki.debian.org/NvidiaGraphicsDrivers> (the Debian way), and
> the drivers were working fine for a few weeks.
> 
> I can't remember how many times I rebooted the system during the time
> when it worked, but it was a few times. I had sometimes gotten similar
> messages upon boot, but I had always assumed it would be like my first
> boot in that I would just have to wait thirty minutes for the boot, so
> rather than waiting I typically did a hard reboot (upon which I did
> not get the message and the system booted immediately). However,
> recently I did a hard reboot and I kept getting the same messages,
> over and over, and they didn't just stop after twenty minutes, making
> my system essentially bricked.

OK. It looks like you're getting general protection faults. It's hard to
tell exactly, because we don't see the top of the oops message (pressing
shift+pgup should allow you to scroll back).

I would suggest, though, that you've possibly got a corrupt disk.
Probably during one of those hard reboots.

> 
> Because it would be rather tedious to type all these messages out
> manually, I have compiled a video for you all to demonstrate the
> problem (please mute the audio):
> 
>     http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ReYNd5p5TvA
> 
> Sorry for the shaky camera; I could not find a suitable place to rest
> the camera.
> 
> Any ideas as to how to debug this? I could probably burn a live Debian
> USB to debug the issue but I suspect that the live system would not
> work without the proprietary drivers included in the system.

If the only proprietary driver you need is the Nvidia X driver, then a
rescue disc will work fine for you. You're likely to be pottering about
at the command line anyway.

I would start by checking SMART logs on both drives (in case they've
failed badly), then try fscking the filesystems. Then try something like
"debsums -c" to search for changed files. With luck, you may just need
to re-install the kernel.

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