[MFchief]

Hey all,

I was unable the to boot up my 1100 today, and the Tormach version of Murphy's law is in full force, since it's Saturday, and I can't call tech support.

My machine is setup pretty much stock and boots directly to PathPilot, but today it didn't work so good.

When I switched it on, I could see a normal looking sequence including some of the PathPilot screens but then it went to a black background with this message:



BusyBox v1.21.1 (Ubuntu 1:1.21.0-1ubuntu1) built-in shell (ash)
Enter 'help' for a list of built-in-commands.

(initramfs) _



And it pretty much stayed there forever. I powered down the controller by the holding the power button for 5 secons method and re-started. It came to a screen which offer me the option of booting into PathPilot, but selecting that just got me back to the screen I described above.

My knowledge of Linux is pretty much restricted to how to spell it, so any suggestions would be very welcome.

Thanks
Terry

[popspipes]

Maybe try reseating the boards and the ram in the computer.

I'm not even real sure how to spell Linux ha!!

[vmax549]

Try this fix https://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?t=287518

(;-) TP

[MFchief]

Thanks for the suggestions guys, but I didn't achieve any success.

When I tried reboot - enter as suggested in the other thread, it worked in the sense that it did reboot, but it just brought me back to the same screen eventually.

I did take a picture of what I get when I tried entering exit at the (initramfs) prompt, and have attached it, in case it is meaningful.

In a way this problem looks almost as if the error in in the pathpilot files and linux might actually work, so I tried to boot the machine directly to the desktop instead of pathpilot, but was unsuccessful. I haven't tried that since way back in the early version 1 days, but my reading in the forum says the way to do it is to hold the left shift and Alt keys when the pathpilot splashscreen appears, is this correct? or might there be an alternative way?

Thanks again

TerryAttachment 442686

[popspipes]

ctrl+ alt+ x then type caja at the terminal prompt, then select desktop.

I never could get the left shift +alt to work reliably.


Desktop screen is empty, so I dont have a clue where to go from there, I havent found the startup menu in the 2.0 versions
Good luck!

[MFchief]

Thanks Mike, I tried that key combo, but either I didn't get the sequence correct, or my controller just isn't responding to it.

I contacted Tormach this morning and sent them screen pics of the errors, waiting for their response now.

Thanks again for you help as well.

Terry

[MFchief]

I got a call back from Tormach, they seemed to think it could be a hard drive on the way out, maybe, but not quite convinced. But the short answer is that doesn't matter.

My biggest concern in the whole issue is that I'm bad about backing up my settings off machine so I was reasonably sure I could get the machine up and running by doing a re-install of PP v 2.0, but at the cost of losing my tool table and such.

But in my conversation with Tormach, I learned something I didn't know. Now maybe I'm the only one in the Tormach Universe that didn't know this but I found out that if you do PP updates via USB stick instead of direct down load, the machine places a copy of the admin settings backup file on that stick.

Since I had done exactly that type of update recently and knew I did not change anything on the machine, I dragged out my PP 2.0 stick and re-installed.

In about 15 minutes I went from dead in the water to up and running with the latest PP update.

Since I got the possibility of an unreliable hard drive in my head from Tormach, I decided it was a good time to update to an SSD so I have a small one on the way, 250 gb was less than $40, so I figured why not.

Thanks again for everyone's advice, and also thanks to Tormach TS, they got back to me with some good advice only about 20 minutes after I emailed them the screen shots.

Terry