Hi there!

Well I'm having a bit of trouble with my fit-pc2 with ubuntu 8.04. It all started one day a few weeks ago when I couldn't ssh into my box, it said access denied which meant that my password was wrong. I'm kinda sure it isn't/wasn't since I have used it many times before to login through ssh (and I tried several times, both over the Internet and over LAN).

I realized that my box might have been compromised so I turned it off by hitting the on/off button for a while. Then I found http://ubuntuforums.org/archive/index.php/t-3609.html stating how to recover/change a password. Only problem was: My keyboard didn't respond when it dropped to the root shell (pressing Num Lock i few times didn't turn on/off the light, it was off all the time meaning no power for the keyboard :/).

Then I had to turn the box off using the button again (I tried a few times, also with the "single" argument at the end as one comment says in the link). Then I tried to boot from my external USB drive containing the recovery image from the fit-pc2 wiki. No matter whether I try booting from the USB drive or the internal drive it says "Operating System not found" as the first thing on the screen (even before GRUB). I just tried booting my laptop from the USB drive and it worked fine?

Can anyone help me out here, how can I boot from the USB drive and change the password on the ubuntu installed on the internal drive, or how can I get my keyboard to respond when dropping to a root shell (if I can get the box to boot from the internal drive again)?

Wiping the internal drive is not really an option, I have a few config files that I would love to keep, as well as some website-stuff that I don't have backups for :S

Kind regards
Kalle

Okay no posts after 24 hours...In the meantime I managed to boot my laptop from the internal drive (booted from USB), then I booted back in windows, created an ubuntu 10.04 VMWare virtual machine og wanted to copy files from the fit-pc2 drive to a shared folder on my windows machine. Suddenly something went wrong and some of the folders i the fit-pc2 linux was turned into files? (eg. etc which was quite important ) so now I'm wiping it anyway and starting all over once again

Any advice on creating a recovery image once I have set up all the applications again?

I have to say that you've run into a bunch of seemingly unrelated incidents.

I would be most concerned about the keyboard not working as in the worst case your USB controller may have died. Have you tried different USB ports and another keyboard? Can you get into BIOS by hitting F2 during startup? The BIOS probably has answers to your USB drive boot issues also.

As for the recovery image. There are several proprietary tools that do the job well. My current favorite is Acronis True Image. There are also some Open Source disk imaging tools mostly based on dd. Personally I prefer rsync for doing a full system backup that I can use for full recovery, but this can be somewhat challenging without deeper understanding of Linux.

For dd disk imaging I found a fairly good article with google: http://www.linuxweblog.com/dd-image (imaging with dd is very slow though).

Thank you for your reply.

Well my keyboard worked fine when hitting esc and changing the kernel bootline so the USB port is not dead Also my first post should tell you that I was able to get into BIOS (in order to change the boot sequence to boot from USB or internal drive) .

Anyway I saw in the 8.04 recovery image that partimage is used to recover so I think I'm going to use partimage to create an image, my only concern is that I need to make an image of the very same install that I'm booted into and partimage says that the source should be unmounted

I tried dd once a few months ago but it was way too slow for me

I also researched rsync back then so I have some idea about what it does. Even though I study computer science I don't have much experience with linux (only my fit-pc2), only a general idea about OS'

Okay after reformatting both usb drive and internal disk, downloading the recovery image, dd'ing to the usb drive and installing (using the script on the recovery image) I'm still having the "Operating System not found" problem when trying to boot. It won't boot from neither usb drive or internal disk

Someone please help me out here

Make sure you have the USB storage removed.

Personally I have never used the fit-pc recovery image.

I would bet that the error lies either with BIOS boot settings or boot sector of your device where you have the OS installed.

One thing you could try is to boot from a Ubuntu 8.04 live CD (if you have a USB optical drive), go to recovery mode and reinstall GRUB. Googling "recovery mode reinstall grub" should give good articles on how to do this.

Another thing that comes into mind is that are you sure you used the dd on the device and not partition (e.g. "dd if=some.image of=/dev/sdX" instead of "dd if=some.image of=/dev/sdX1")?

I guess you're right about where the problem lies since I can boot my laptop from both the USB drive and the internal hitachi drive (through a SATA to USB bridge).

I don't have a USB optical drive so the only thing I can do is booting my laptop from a live cd and maybe reinstall grub on the internal drive that way? (I think I tried that already without luck).

I am quite sure that I used dd on the drive and not partition I don't think I could boot my laptop from the USB drive if I didn't, am I right?

Thanks for trying to help me out, I'm quite lost here

(I also tried doing a BIOS update but that didn't work either, I didn't boot to the USB drive with the updating files even though I followed the guide on the wiki)

I found this thread: viewtopic.php?f=37&t=769

disabling the diagnostic (returning to BIOS defaults) helped so I can boot fine now