Trouble in River City

["Robert G. brown" <rbrown@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Yeah, I got Touble,
   Right Here in River City
      With a capital T, anf that rhymes with B and that stands for "Backup"

OK, enough stealing from "The Music Man", and my real trouble is NOT
backups, but rather an inability to use them....

On  Tuesday morning, by boot drive didn't.  Boot, that is...

In fact, the system wouldn't come up, and I had to go to work.

Late Tuesady afternoon, I was able to determine that my boot drive, a 2.5 GB
Fugitsu, had gone south.   This drive contains system configuration and Linux
info.  But I call Fugitsu, and they will replace it under their "no excuses" warranty
program.  They pay for everything, including shipping, and I get a brand-spankin'
new drive out of it.

A nice, clean new drive, covered by the same warranty.

Devoid of data.

BUT... I've been backing stuff up! Loadloaded the newest version of ftape from
sunsite a couple of months ago, write and reads my tape drive like a champ.

So I have everything on tape. No problem, right?

Well, I knew it wasn't that simple. To get that version of ftape to work, a kernel
recompile was called for to REMOVE ftape support (it's now preferable to use it
as a module), then compile ftape, install and test it.

Now, before I did that, I had to get a new hard drive and re-install the system.
That was the easy part.

By Wednesday noon, the new hard drive (a 4.3 Gb Maxtor, this is my second Fugitsu
that's become a casualty, when the new one comes back I'll use it for something less
critical, but I've never been burned by a Maxtor) ) was installed and  running RH Linux
4.2, with X-Windows and all the compilers, development libraries and source code I think
is needed to compile the kernel. I also got a new copy of ftape from unc.sunsite.edu ,
/pub/Linux.  So now I was loaded and ready to go.

Of course, my big error was that I failed to make a bootable floppy of the right kernel
and the ftape executable.  Luckily, my backups (I'd finished a cycle, including the KLUG
meeting notes from last Sunday) are very complete, so Once I get over  these problems
everything should be just fine, right?

My problem is that kernel does not compile!  I've done this before, listened to Bruce
last week, and went though the steps. I either get a lot of error messages from the
compiler, or the compiler (gcc) or the libaray archine (ar) actually crashes.

This is no good at all! I have a lot of stuff(about 1.5 Gb) of tape archives, which
can't be read until (at least) the new kernel and ftape are ready.  I've done everything
that comes to mind... loading more libraries, re-installing the system,  running the compile
NO configuration changes (just to see if my setting changes have some wierd effects).

So now I am looking for someone with more experience in these matters than yours truly
to come on over here and show me the error of my ways.  If you are interested we should
talk about this, preferably prior to Sunday.  Anyone with ideas or suggestions are also
welcome, even if they are evidence that great minds think alike.

Also, in the middle of this, I decided to check my email, using this system, a 486 running
Windoze 3.11 and Microsft Intenet Mail. Apparently a configuration problem on this system
caused me to lose a days worth of mail when I dialed up and tried to download stuff, so
if you sent me anything between Late monday night and late Tuesday night, please resend it.

                                                                                                              Regards,
                                                                                                                 ---> RGB <---