Chapter 20. Troubleshooting

Introduction
A Boot Disk
Creating A Boot Floppy With Drakfloppy
Testing the boot disk
Backup
Why Backup?
Preparing your System
What to Backup?
Where to Backup?
Backup Media
When to Back Up?
Backup Example Using tar
Restore
Restore Example Using tar
Making a Recovery CD-ROM
My System Freezes at Boot Time
System Hanging During Boot
File System Check on Boot Fails
Bootloader and File-System Issues
Bootloader Reinstall
Repairing a Damaged Super-Block
Backing Up and Restoring the MBR
Recovering Deleted Files
Runlevels
Brief Description of What Runlevels Are
What Can Runlevels do For me?
Recovering From a System Freeze
Killing Misbehaved Apps
From The Console
Using Graphical Monitoring Tools
Configuring X From the Console
Miscellaneous
Mandrake's Specific Troubleshooting Tools
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 for when something goes wrong and how to fix it.