Fedora Core 2 upgrade FAILURE

[Phil Schaffner]

On Tue, 2004-06-01 at 08:09 -0700, Richard Emberson wrote:
> I have an older machine that can not boot from cdrom. Also, I had
> some user data in one of the accounts.
> 
> So I mounted disc1, copied vmlinuz and initrd.img to /boot, unmounted
> disc1, added entry to /etc/grub.conf, then rebooted:
> 
> mount /dev/cdrom
> cp -a /mnt/cdrom/isolinux/vmlinuz /boot/FC2-install
> cp -a /mnt/cdrom/isolinux/initrd.img /boot/FC2-install.img
> umount /mnt/cdrom
> and add entry like:
> title Fedora Core 2 Installation
>          root (hd0,0)
>          kernel /FC2-install
>          initrd /FC2-install.img
> to /etc/grub.conf (use /boot/FC2... when not relative to /boot)
> 
> Everything was going along fine; I did an upgrade (not install) and 
> after 1 1/2 hours it said that the installation was a success and that
> I should click the reboot button ... which I did.
> 
> Well, reboot started out ok, there was a single boot option on the
> grub boot page, but then it asked me to insert disc1. I did so
> and it then asked me if I wanted to upgrade or install.
> 
> hmmm.....
> 
> I selected upgrade and it proceeded to "upgrade" a php rpm from disc1
> and compat-db rpm from disc3 and announced that the installation was
> successful and that I should click on the reboot button.
> 
> Ok, reboot started and then once again it requested that I insert disc1
> and once again it installed the same two rpm's, php from disc1 and
> compat-db from disc3 and announced that the installation was a success.
> 
> I tried one more time with the same result.
> 
> So how do I break out of this? I really dont care about either
> php or compat-db, I'd like to somehow bypass installing them and
> get on with the boot. Are there parameters one can give at the grub
> command line to force a kernel load?
> 
> Help! Thanks.

Hummm... Looks like anaconda didn't correctly update the bootloader,
which should have been the default.  Did you tell it not to update GRUB
during the upgrade?  Possible confusion between MBR and boot record of
the active partition?  If you did request that the bootloader be
updated, and don't find another head-slapper cause, then this is one for
Bugzilla.

You should be able to recover either by booting from the rescue disk
image and following directions, or by using the command line in GRUB.
GRUB command-line completion with TAB should help.

At the menu type "c" for a command line, then assuming a standard
kernel, /boot is /dev/hda1, and / is labeled:

root (hd0,0)
kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.5-1.358 ro root=LABEL=/
initrd /initrd-2.6.5-1.358.img
boot

If you get it started, then add the following stanza
to /boot/grub/grub.conf

title Fedora Core (2.6.5-1.358)
        root (hd0,0)
        kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.5-1.358 ro root=LABEL=/1 rhgb quiet
        initrd /initrd-2.6.5-1.358.img

May need to run "grub-install" if the boot device (e.g. MBR vs. active
partition) is/was incorrect.

Phil