[TriLUG] Locked Out Linux box (Denouement)

Mon Oct 23 14:42:30 EDT 2017

Glad to hear you found a fix, albeit difficult.

I ditched SuSE years ago for Ubuntu. SuSE created overlapping partitions 
during installation! I also don't like the KDE interface as well as Gnome. 
And, at the time, Ubuntu "just worked." I struggled with multi-media under SuSE.

At on time, I tested three distros and triple booted Linux to try out Ubuntu, 
Debian and SuSE. As I said, Ubuntu won. Of course it is Debian-based. I 
actually run Xubuntu because it's less resource hungry, using the XFCE interface.

Good luck with CENTOS.

--
Roger W. Broseus - Linux User
     Email: RogerB at bronord.com
     Web Site: www.bronord.com

On 10/23/2017 10:41 AM, Paul Boyle via TriLUG wrote:
> Here is the denouement to my saga:
>
> To get my laptop back to some reasonable functionality, I ditched
> OpenSuSE LEAP 42.2, wiped the disk clean, and installed CENTOS 7.  I
> restored my back up and things mostly seem to work (I have to update
> firefox bookmarks and other piddily tasks).
>
> It's sort of sad, I've been a SuSE user since SuSE 7.x series (I think
> it was 7.3, not sure). I've always been pretty happy with that
> distribution. It was rock solid stable. They were early supporters of
> hardware accelerated OpenGL (which is useful for my work). The
> installer is great (much better than anaconda, imho), and the yast2
> sysadmin tool is pretty good too. I'll miss those. OpenSuSE was great
> up until about version 12.2 or 12.3 when systemd was introduced.
> Versions 13.1 and 13.2 were a slight improvement, but I began to feel
> more and more that I wasn't in charge of the computer (even as root).
> For example, doing a simple 'ls -ltr' (as root) on a user's home
> directory would "stall" for over 90 seconds sometime.
>
> In any case, adios, OpenSuSE.  Hello, CENTOS 7.
>
> Thanks to everyone who offered advice.
>
> Paul
>
>
> On Fri, 20 Oct 2017 16:08:02 -0400
> Paul Boyle via TriLUG <trilug at trilug.org> wrote:
>
>> To give all an update:
>>
>> My laptop is working again. I gave my computer to one of the tech's in
>> my department's electronic shop. He drained the battery and reset the
>> BIOS.  He also gave me the hard drive.  I was able to back up
>> my /home/boyle user account to an external drive.
>>
>> I used:
>>
>> find . -depth -print0 | cpio --null -pmvd <external storage device>
>>
>> I had to wipe my disk clean (gdisk, deleted all the partitions).  I
>> reinstalled OpenSuSE LEAP 42.2. One change I made from my previous
>> installation ( / partition used btrfs and /home used xfs):  I
>> changed the install so that / uses an xfs filesystem as does /home.
>>
>> I restored /home/boyle from my back up using the same command as above
>> (changing the current and target directories as appropriate.
>>
>> One curious result (I know this isn't a rigourous test, but my backup
>> copy of my /home/boyle directory was 26 GB on the external drive (and
>> that's what it was on the laptop's hard drive before the crash.  I
>> after I restored to the newly formatted filesystem, /home/boyle was
>> only 25GB.  Does this indicate data loss, or could it somehow be due
>> to a more efficient packing on the disk when it was restored?
>>
>> Thanks for any guidance.
>>
>> Paul
>>
>> On Fri, 13 Oct 2017 12:22:38 -0400
>> Mauricio Tavares <raubvogel at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>> On Fri, Oct 13, 2017 at 11:51 AM, Paul Boyle via TriLUG
>>> <trilug at trilug.org> wrote:
>>>> Here is an update on my sad laptop's situation:
>>>> I gave the laptop to one of the electronics technicians in my
>>>> department.  He was able to reboot the computer with the hard
>>>> drive removed, but booting up failed with the hard drive in.  I
>>>> need to talk to him to see what the error message was.
>>>>
>>>> This is sounding like something in my /boot filesystem got
>>>> hammered. Sigh.
>>>>
>>>        If it boots fine,s pecially when you slap a new HD in it, the
>>> problem is somewhere in your HD, like some kind of corruption,
>>> virus, or aliens.
>>>
>>>> Paul
>>>>
>>>> On Thu, 12 Oct 2017 01:54:03 +0000
>>>> Paul Boyle via TriLUG <trilug at trilug.org> wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> Hi,
>>>>>
>>>>> I have a big problem:  I'm running OpenSuSE LEAP 42.2 on an Acer
>>>>> Aspire E17 x86_64 (Core i5 machine).  My machine froze (no mouse,
>>>>> unresponsive keyboard (couldn't switch to another VT)).  So, I
>>>>> did what most people would do:  I hit the power button to
>>>>> reboot. I got prompted with question that was something like
>>>>> this:  "Do you agree to use only Linux (or was it Opensuse?)
>>>>> certified boot loaders? (or something like that).  The default
>>>>> answer was "No".  So I hit "No". Then I got a brief message
>>>>> saying the machine is locked out, and the machine powered off.
>>>>>
>>>>> Now, the machine will not even come up with a BIOS set up
>>>>> message.  I power it on, and the power light goes on, and then
>>>>> nothing.  I opened the DVD drive to try to boot from the
>>>>> installation media.  No dice there either.  Basically, I've
>>>>> bricked my laptop, which is really a bad thing for me.
>>>>>
>>>>> How can I rescue my laptop?  Will taking out and reinstalling the
>>>>> battery pack and/or the CMOS or BIOS battery clear this lock out?
>>>>>
>>>>> Any help would be appreciated.
>>>>>
>>>>> Thanks,
>>>>>
>>>>> Paul
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> --
>>>> Paul D. Boyle, Ph. D.
>>>> Manager, X-ray Facility
>>>> Department of Chemistry
>>>> Western University
>>>> London, ON N6A 5B7
>>>> Canada
>>>> GPG Fingerprint: 8ECE 516D 9046 FE83 4A46  7E8E D720 555D 8CC3
>>>> EC6B
>>>>
>>>> --
>>>> This message was sent to: raubvogel at gmail.com
>>>> <raubvogel at gmail.com> To unsubscribe, send a blank message to
>>>> trilug-leave at trilug.org from that address. TriLUG mailing list :
>>>> https://www.trilug.org/mailman/listinfo/trilug Unsubscribe or edit
>>>> options on the web  :
>>>> https://www.trilug.org/mailman/options/trilug/raubvogel%40gmail.com
>>>> Welcome to TriLUG: http://trilug.org/welcome
>>
>>
>
>
>
>