SCO system down. Can anyone help?

[mightyscotchpine]

We have a SCO 5.0.5 that crashed at some point last night. When I restarted it, I was able to pass the boot: prompt. It got to "loading kernel hd(40)unix .bss" and froze. It did this a couple of times.
NOW when I hit enter at the boot: prompt, the entire machine restarts.
SCO says that if SCO stops at the "loading...bss" message and says "hit enter to continue" that I should disable APM by entering the boot string: defbootstr apm.no32pm=disable

If I do this, it still restarts the machine.
I also went into the Bios and disabled APM. It did the same thing.

I tried booting from the emergency boot disks and got the same result.

Has anyone run into this? Everyone is out of our system because of this, and the phone is ringing off the hook.

scott mcdaniel
mightscotchpine@yahoo.com

 

[stanhubble]

What type of machine is this?
sounds hw related....
you might also try the defbootstr mem=/p

 

[mightyscotchpine]

Stan,

You're right. It was hw related. The simple fact that it did the same thing when I used my boot floppy disk says to me that it's not the os, and it's not the hdd.
Turns out, it was the RAM.

Thanks for the response.

Scott

 

[Guest_imported]

We had used a SCO openserver 5.0.5 system, now there were a hard disk trouble. When I power on the computer, the system told me "NO OS", and could not boot.But there were a lot of important data on this hard disk, how can I restore these data?
There was another computer with SCO openserver 5.0.5 ,which was same as the bad one, can I use the good computer system to restore the bad one? Waiting for your help, thank you very much!

 

[patw]

To: "Restore hard disk (Visitor)"

Don't add new problems on the end of an existing post - it probably won't be seen.

There are several ways to approach your problem - all very technically oriented.

Not knowing your level of knowledge, and if in fact you do NOT have a good, recent backup
then I would suggest you find a consultant familier with Openserver in your area.

http://www.pcunix.com

or

http://www.caldera.com

would be a good place to start your search.

- And get good backup software for the future, like Backup Edge (

http://www.microlite.com)

or Lone-tar (

http://www.cactus.com)

Possible aproaches are:

1) boot from your emergency boot OR original installation disks and get to a shell and attempt fsck on the root filesystem

2) remove the disk and mount it on the other SCO system (it MUST use the same SCSI adaptor
OR they must both be IDE) and attempt a fsck on it there

3) send the disk to one of the firms that do hard disk recovery ($$$)