Chapter 13. Troubleshooting

Table of Contents
13.1. Introduction
13.2. A boot disk
13.2.1. Using the console
13.2.2. Using drakfloppy to create a boot disk
13.2.3. Testing the boot disk
13.2.4. You are done!
13.3. Backup
13.3.1. Why backup?
13.3.2. Preparing your system
13.3.3. What to backup
13.3.4. Where to backup?
13.3.5. Backup media
13.3.6. When to backup?
13.3.7. Backup example using TAR
13.4. Restore
13.4.1. Restore example using TAR
13.4.2. Making a Recovery CD-ROM
13.5. My system freezes at boot time
13.5.1. System hanging during boot
13.5.2. Filesystem check on boot fails
13.6. Bootloader reinstall
13.6.1. Using a boot disk
13.6.2. Repairing a damaged Super-Block
13.7. Runlevels
13.7.1. Brief description of what runlevels are
13.7.2. What can runlevels do for me?
13.8. Recovering deleted files
13.9. Recovering from a system freeze
13.10. Killing misbehaved apps
13.10.1. From the console
13.10.2. Using XKILL
13.10.3. Using other graphical tools
13.11. Mandrake's specific troubleshooting tools
13.12. Final thoughts

13.1. Introduction

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 when something goes wrong and how to fix it.

How many times have you felt foolish for not having backed up that little config file you've just managed to break? How many times have you lost all of your program's preferences after installing misbehaving software or even after accidentally deleting some config file? How many times has your computer stopped booting after that bleeding edge kernel testing you were doing? I have, many times... actually more than I would like to admit :-)

There are some people who recompile their kernel or tweak their config files every day of the week, every week of the month, every month of the year. You might not be one of them but, believe me, some day you will want or need to do that; so let's assume that these are not uncommon scenarios in every day GNU/Linux life. All of them can be managed without any hassle at all if you use a little common sense and follow some practices and guidelines we will introduce you to. These will help you when those times come.

So, on to the basic things you need to have ready...


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