Purpose of "System Recovery" boot option?

[Monkgs]

At the bottom of my menu.lst file, on a clean install off of the LinuxMCE DVD I have a menu option:

Code Select Expand

### END DEBIAN AUTOMAGIC KERNELS LIST

                title           System Recovery
                root            (hd0,5)
                kernel          /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.20-15-generic root=UUID=f64a7de8-3eb6-42ee-93f5-8737ad0e5f84 quiet install_from_hdd
                initrd          /boot/initrd.img-2.6.20-15-generic

This seems to point to a non-existent kernel image and initrd image. Is there any reason this is here?

[tschak909]

If you install from the DVD, there is another partition made, nominally mounted at /mnt/recovery, containing a system recovery image.

-Thom

[Monkgs]

Yes, I checked there but it only contained 2.6.22-14 kernel images. Maybe a bug?

[tschak909]

perhaps.

-Thom

[Zaerc]

In that case, just change both instances of "2.6.20-15-generic" into "2.6.22-14" (or whatever the actual kernel version is on that partition).

[Monkgs]

Naturally. Was just wondering if I was missing something obvious. I don't really care for my own stuff, but I wrote a how-to on boot+raid and it was relevant to the doc.

[JRoque]

Hi. I'm in need of recovering since MythTV is messed up. I tried the system recovery menu but, as pointed here, it has the wrong kernel level and it fails. I edited that to 2.6.22-14 but I still get "error 15. file not found". I assume hd0,5 is good for sata recovery partition sda6, yes?

Thanks,
JR

[JRoque]

Hello again. Beyond fixing the version numbers from 2.6.20.15 to 2.6.22.14, the other problem is that there's no "initrd.img-2.6.22-14-generic" file in the recovery partition. The file there was named: "initrd.img-2.6.22-14-generic.bak". Note the ".bak" suffix.

Until it's fixed, I've edited the menu to say:

Title      System Recovery
root      (hd0,5)
kernel    /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.22-14-generic root=UUID=f64a7de8-3eb6-42ee-93f5-8737ad0e5f84 quiet install_from_hdd
initrd     /boot/initrd.img-2.6.22-14-generic.bak

It booted to the recovery partition but I can't tell if it's doing anything. Probably due to the "quite" option above.

Thanks,
JR

[JRoque]

Hi. Well, recovery doesn't work. I got the recovery partition to boot but it failed with another error and hung.

I'm now on my 3rd and last MCE install. I think I've given it a fair chance and will be disappointed if I can't make it go. But it's consuming all of my time and I can't picture myself rolling it out throughout my home and then have it break like this. Wish me luck!

JR

[Zaerc]

So how exactly did MythTV got "messed up"?

[JRoque]

Hi. I wish I knew exactly how it did so I could fix it or better yet report it intelligently. But no, I have no idea why it stopped recognizing my HDHomeRun in the sources or input (?) setup page. The device was still there in the admin page but it didn't show in the mythtv setup page. Trying to add the tuners back in did nothing. In fact, I could not add any of the available tuners from the drop down list; after pressing "finish" the screen was still blank with no tuners added.

On the plus side, and after cooling down a bit (sorry), reloading MCE and restoring a backup from last week fixed everything including accounts, settings, etc. It did not restore mythtv's channel lists but, fortunately, I had an open browser on another machine with the correct page loaded (http.://mcebox/mythweb/settings/channels) and simply hit the save button and all my channels were back. Good thing because that took hours to match to the listings. Overall, restoring saved me and I can live with how it all went.

Back to subject, System Recovery did not work for me. I'm not sure what a "UUID" is but, do I need to update that as well with some unique number for my installation? Perhaps that's why recovery didn't work.

Oops, just noticed I'm in the "developer" area.

Thanks,
JR

[Zaerc]

Glad to see you were able to fix it without to much hassle.

I've never done a dvd install, so I have no idea how broken it is and in wich ways exactly.  But you should be able to see what the UUID should be with "vol_id /dev/sda6" (or hda6, or whatever partition the recovery is actually on).

[Monkgs]

It's also important to add that the recovery option probably doesn't do what you're hoping for. It's not like "System Restore" in Windows. Since it's broken, and has been since the release of 0710, I don't think anyone has ever used it.