Scary X1000 crash story

Edit:
Hmm...this sounds like the problems people are having in the AmiUdate z.library thread. Could be I ran AmiUpdate before my problem appeared.

Just had a scary experience with my X1000. It's been working great since 2012 without a problem but then.....

A few days ago I was using it just fine earlier in the day then rebooted.
It came up with the following Guru and rebooting didn't help.

Guru Meditation: 80000003 Task 0x6243C080 ("ramlib") generated an error of type DSI on address 0x7FF943E0.
Redzone was not damaged.
Stack pointer is inside bounds.

No matter what I did it still crashed on bootup. Tried replacing the battery with a new one. Still crashed, even though my old battery measured 2.88 volts and the new one 3.24 volts.

Tried all the hardware tricks and tips but no go.
Even booted up my old uA1 so I could email but all the software was to out of date to work. :|

Tried holding down both mouse buttons on booting up to get to the emergency System boot partition I have on another drive but the boot menu would not come up. Sigh...

Tried booting from and Emergency boot CD I created when I was on OS4 Update6 (thought I didn't need to update it since I had the emergency boot partition) but it would boot to a blank high resolution Workbench screen and pop up a requestion saying that it couldn't find the Input.prefs file. Sigh...

So, I tried holding down both mouse buttons while the CD was booting and the boot menu managed to come up. I then selected my emergency boot partition but it just booted to a low resolution workbench screen with nothing on the screen and just hung there.

What to do:
Well I booted to the boot menu with the CD again and manged to boot from the emergency partition with no startup sequency. From the Shell I used the copy all command to copy my emergency boot partition to my regular system partition then reboot......SUCCESS!!

Fortuantly I had backed up my System: partition about a week ago so I restored it and everything is working fine now.

Moral of the story:
Keep my Emergency boot partition more up to date!
Keep my Emergency boot CD up to date.
Going to make another boot CD right now!
Update my uA1 with the most recent applications so i can use it as a backup until the A1222 gets here to serve as a backup.

Kevin

Welcome in my world : https://www.amigans.net/modules/xforum ... id=120251#forumpost120251

Fortunately, we managed to find a solution to this.

I had this same situation bite me hard several days ago, causing the ramlib DSI so early in the startup that I could not boot without startup-sequence. Unfortunately my backup partition was not as current as I would like, so I really did not want to do a full restore from it to get back to working main partition. Spent a lot of time trying to figure out which part of several amiupdates run at same time caused the problem.

Never did find it on my own, but the thread K-L points to above mentioned z.library. So I copied over the z.library from the backup partition and now I am booting from main System again.

And next I am doing a current backup.

Going foward I am only going to let Amiupdate to one update at a time and not multiple, so I can easier track down a problem. Also will keep my backup more current. :)

Thanks, guys, for the info that steered me right.

EDIT: Hmmm. Is z.library the only file affected, I wonder? It's the only one I replaced to get back to booting.

z.library was the only file impacted indeed.

I use a program that runs on boot and mirrors my DH0: to a backup drive. I’ll dig out the details and add here.

@ddni

If you did not update your system when the wrong z.library was available via AmiUpdate, no need to dig in anything I think.

@ddni

Quote:Good plan.

I hope you have it set up so it only runs after a successful boot - otherwise it could do more damage than benefit .

Best regards,

Niels

@K-L

Quote:I think he meant to share his setup because it could be a useful example for others to follow to be able to easily recover from such a situation in the future.

Best regards,

Niels

@nbache

Thanks for the explanation.

Here, I'm using Backup by hand to backup all my partitions on a regular basis

@K-L

I wrote me an arexx script which does that automatically after three months...

@Niels

Hi, yes I meant share how I mirror my DH0:

Good point about the issue of backing up a failed boot. I typically use this in case of a hard drive failure that stops DH0 loading. It runs as part of my user-startup, however I can see the potential for bad files to be copied over automatically.

I have now changed to only running the program manually AFTER a good boot.

The program I use is Daniel Westerbergs Backup https://aminet.net/package/disk/bakup/BackUp

My shell command is this:
WORK:Programs/WBApps/BackUp/BackUp SOURCE SYSTEM: TARGET SYSTEMBACKUP: BACKUP SHELLMODE AUTOQUIT

SYSTEMBACKUP: is a separate physical hard drive with a lower boot priority than my DH0:

SHELLMODE stops the program GUI from appearing
Don't use AUTOQUIT if you want the program to stay open.

and don't forget to have a *working* bootmedium available!
cd/dvd or usb stick.
the best backup may become useless if you can't boot up your machine at all because your BOOT partition (holding the amigaboot part) is destroyed.

regards...
michael

And of course the classic gotcha of backups:

Test your backup procedure by actually restoring your backup and seeing if it works, at least once in a while.

You don't want to discover that your backup was a "write-only" on the day where you actually need it.

In other words: A backup you can't restore is no backup.

Best regards,

Niels