Dockstar won't boot after locking up

Hello,

I'm hoping that someone could assist me getting my debian squeeze running again on my dockstar. I have a 4 gig pen drive that is partitioned with about 2.8 gig for the system and 1.2 gig for swap. The system partition is fat32 and the swap partition is ext2.

Yesterday, the dockstar appeared locked up, so I pulled the power to reboot it. It has not rebooted into squeeze since. The dockstar's os boots OK and I can see the pen drive. I can mount the pen drive partition without a problem and I can see all the files. I have been able to also mount my 1.5 tb external drive. The external drive was sda1 and the pen drive was sdb1, so I unplugged the external to try to get this thing to boot back up.

I typically have to boot into the pogo os, and then issue a reboot command in order for squeeze to boot up. That has worked fine (even with the external plugged in) for a couple of months now.

I tried reinstalling jeff's uboot and that didn't seem to have any effect.

The fsck on the pogo OS did not want to do anything to fix the drive, and when I plugged it into my windows box, the fat32 partition is showing up as being a RAW partition so I can't scandisk it. I'm not sure exactly why that is however...

I'm not sure what else to try... Does anyone have any suggestions for me, please?

Thanks



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 01/09/2011 10:24AM by BoomSchtick.

BoomSchtick Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Hello,
>
> I'm hoping that someone could assist me getting my
> debian squeeze running again on my dockstar. I
> have a 4 gig pen drive that is partitioned with
> about 2.8 gig for the system and 1.2 gig for swap.
> The system partition is fat32 and the swap
> partition is ext2.

> I tried reinstalling jeff's uboot and that didn't seem to have any effect.

Yeah. Don't keep doing that unless you want the chance of corrupting your NAND as well.

> I'm not sure what else to try... Does anyone have
> any suggestions for me, please?

Don't use Fat32 for the System partition and don't use ext2 for swap. If you need to be able to read your Debian install on a Windows box, use something like the Ext2 driver for Windows. http://www.fs-driver.org/

System: ext2
Swap: linux-swap

Your Fat32 partition is probably corrupted. Fat32 not only isn't native to Linux, but isn't fully implemented as it is on Windows due to patent restrictions.

Thanks for the reply. I was actually able to get it to work. The system partition is actually Ext2 and the swap in fact linux-swap. I'm not sure why the fdisk -l on the pogo was showing the system partition as fat32. I booted up to a gpartd disk and it properly showed the system partition as Ext2. I told gpartd to scan and repair the system partition and it was able to fix it so that it properly booted to Debian.

This has made me nervous about using the dockstar the way that I am. I might try to find a cheap netbook with more memory.