How to Trackdown a Hardware Failure with Knoppix?

[Brian Densmore]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Coffee Grounds
> 
> 
> Hello, 
> 
> I believe I've had some form of hardware failure and I wonder if there
> is a way to track it down with Knoppix.
> 
> My Knoppix HD install simply will not boot (hangs when X attempts to
> launch) and booting off the CD is unsuccessful as well.
> 
> I can boot Knoppix off the CD in failsafe mode. The question 
> is, what do
> I do after that to figure out what's causing the failure?
What do you get when you boot in failsafe mode? Is it text only?
Or do you get a gui?

Here's two things to try I haven't seen mentioned.

>From a command line type lspci | less
if you don't have less use more instead.
Look through the output and see if your video card is
being detected. If you don't see it then replace your video card.
I suspect that isn't the issue since you can boot into failsafe
mode. Although that is an assumption and quite possibly not a valid one.
It could be that your video card is partly functional. Possibly shorting out
somewhere (like where there is dust touching two contacts).

Second thing to try is, if you are launching knoppix to a text only mode,
from a command line type in startx. This should launch X or give some indication why
it is failing.

More things to look at. Since you have Linux installed on the machine, and you
can launch knoppix in safe mode, you should be able to look at the log files
for your installed system. You'll have to mount the partitions if knoppix didn't
do it by default. Look in /var/log for the various logs such a kernel and dmesg.
Careful with the dmesg logfile as typing in "dmesg" will get you the current boot
process's dmesg rather than cat /partitiontoinstalledlinux/var/log/dmesg |less 
which should print out the dmesg from the last time your system either booted successfully
or last time it tried. there may be a wealth of useful data in the log files,
or they may be useless in solving your problem.