I have a fairly infrequently used system in our lounge that I use occasionally when I want to display stuff on the telvision.
Yesterday it failed to boot when I tried to use it so, after a few failed retries I went and got my laptop. As per "Problem 1" *that* wouldn't connect to the WiFi. To get round the immediate problem I got a long patch cable and connected that way, so we could see the pictures I wanted to show on the TV!
So, I'd like to get the dead CMOS system back up and running. I've replaced the CMOS battery and loaded "Optimised defaults" into the CMOS. That didn't initially work at all because it didn't enable the SATA ROM and the system, though a few years old, has just one disk drive which is a SATA disk. I've now enabled the SATA disk and the SATA ROM in the CMOS and it gets a bit further, GRUB comes up and offers me three or four kernel versions plus memtest. Memory checks OK.
If I just let it go on to the default kernel it pops up the disk ID, thinks for a while, then pops up the disk ID again with "Starting system" below, and that's it.
I tried the recovery mode and it looks as if it can't read the SATA disk drive, though obviously the CMOS can as otherwise it wouldn't boot into GRUB at all. It goes through a load of timeout messages and then there's a kernel panic. I was going to try and produce some detail by copying to my laptop but that's waiting for the solution to "Problem 1"!
Is there any way to copy/save the boot messages produced by GRUB in recovery mode so I can Google for them and/or show them here so that someone might be able to decipher what's wrong?
... and/or can anyone suggest something deep in the CMOS settings that might have been lost and is necessary for Linux to boot from SATA successfully? It's running Xubuntu 10.10 (I think!).