On 10/01/13 15:07, Barry Samuels wrote:
I have now received a new PSU so I could fire up the board again. I tried setting the BIOS to defaults - no change. The BIOS was version 8 something and the latest is version 17 something so I updated the BIOS
- no change. I have now rigged the SATA drive as a USB external as
both my main computer and the spare computer will both boot from USB. I have discovered that this drive won't boot on my main computer either so I swapped it over to the spare together with a USB DVD drive with Knoppix on, booted into Knoppix, and re-wrote the MBR using LILO. That drive still won't boot so perhaps it's not the board after all. I can't help feeling that I've done/not done something embarrassingly obvious. I have now gone into 'stumped' mode.
OK, I seem to remember that as well as a MBR, disks have also an Active flag, and a Bootable flag. If either of these flags have become reset, then it won't boot from them. I think you can check and change these flags with fdisk but not sure.
Did Knoppix read the disk was OK? Did you fsck it? If not, perhaps you should, and/or run some other disk tests (system rescue CD or ultimate boot CD)
When you say it "won't boot" - what exactly doesn't it do/does it say? There are different varieties of won't boot - e.g.
Insert system disk - Disk failure, or not connected, or no boot/active flags set
Grub/Lilo menu, then error message - then it's done the first part of the boot and something else is failed/corrupted (e.g. initfamfs)
Good luck Steve