Fedora Core 2 upgrade FAILURE

[Richard Emberson]

Phil Schaffner wrote:
> 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
> 
> 
> 

Interestingly, I do not have initrd-2.6.5-1.358.img in my /boot
directory. I do have the previous 2.4.x initrd version, but not the
2.6.x version. (I also do not have the file memtest86+-1.11
... comparing the contents of the failed upgrade machine's /boot
directory to a successfully installed machine's /boot directory).

Also, grub does not have the networking commands, e.g., ifconfig, so
I can not try a network-base access to initrd-2.6.5-1.358.img on
some other machine.

Is there a way to read initrd-2.6.5-1.358.img from the cdrom disc1
or the rescue disc? Either read it and put it into the /boot directory
or somehow reference the cdrom as a directory path root in the grub
command line?

Again, my old VALinux machine does not allow booting from a cdrom.

Thanks

Richard