Chapter 21. Troubleshooting

1. Introduction
2. A Boot Disk
2.1. Creating a Boot Floppy from the Console
2.2. Testing the Boot Disk
3. Backup
3.1. Why Backup?
3.2. Preparing your System
3.3. What to Backup?
3.4. Where to Back Up?
3.5. When to Back Up?
3.6. Backup Example Using tar
4. Restore
4.1. Restore Example Using tar
4.2. Making a Recovery CD-ROM
5. Problems Arising at Boot Time
5.1. System Hanging during Boot
5.2. File-System Check on Boot Fails
5.3. X Doesn't Start
6. Bootloader Issues
6.1. Bootloader Reinstall
6.2. Backing Up and Restoring the MBR
7. File System Issues
7.1. Repairing a Damaged Super-Block
7.2. Recovering Deleted Files
8. Recovering from a System Freeze
9. Killing Misbehaving Apps
9.1. From the Console
9.2. Using Graphical Monitoring Tools
10. Miscellaneous
11. Mandrakelinux's Specific Troubleshooting Tools
12. General Guidelines for Solving a Problem under Mandrakelinux
12.1. Search the Internet
12.2. Mailing Lists and Newsgroups Archives
12.3. Directly Contacting the Person in Charge
12.4. Mandrakesoft Business Services
13. Final Thoughts

Abstract

This chapter will guide you through some troubleshooting basics, that is: what to do when everything goes wrong or, better yet, what to do to be prepared if something goes wrong and then how to fix it.