Chapter 15. Troubleshooting

Table of Contents
15.1. Introduction
15.2. A Boot Disk
15.2.1. Creating a Boot Floppy From The Console
15.2.2. Using drakfloppy to Create a Boot Disk
15.2.3. Testing the boot disk
15.2.4. You are Done!
15.3. Backup
15.3.1. Why Backup?
15.3.2. Preparing Your System
15.3.3. What to Backup?
15.3.4. Where to Backup?
15.3.5. Backup Media
15.3.6. When to Back Up?
15.3.7. Backup Example Using TAR
15.4. Restore
15.4.1. Restore Example Using TAR
15.4.2. Making a Recovery CD-ROM
15.5. My System Freezes at Boot Time
15.5.1. System Hanging During Boot
15.5.2. File System Check on Boot Fails
15.6. Bootloader Reinstall
15.6.1. Using a Boot Disk
15.6.2. Repairing a Damaged Super-Block
15.7. Runlevels
15.7.1. Brief Description of What Runlevels Are
15.7.2. What Can Runlevels do For me?
15.8. Recovering Deleted Files
15.9. Recovering From a System Freeze
15.10. Killing Misbehaved Apps
15.10.1. From The Console
15.10.2. Using XKILL
15.10.3. Using Other Graphical Tools
15.11. Mandrake's Specific Troubleshooting Tools
15.12. Final Thoughts

15.1. 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 for when something goes wrong and how to fix it.

How many times have you felt foolish for not having backed up that little configuration 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 configuration 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 configuration 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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