latest updates don't boot

[Chip Old]

On Fri, 21 Jul 2006 07:16 -0400, tomhorsley at adelphia.net wrote:

> I haven't had time to do much investigation on this yet, but last night 
> I genned FC5 from the DVD, it came up OK, then I downloaded all the 
> latest updates which got me to 2.6.17-1.2157 and now the boot never 
> seems to finish - it just stops printing messages really early (possibly 
> around the time it normally switches to the graphical boot which I 
> hadn't yet turned off). The disk doesn't seem to be running anymore and 
> a reasonable amount of waiting didn't change anything. It isn't totally 
> frozen - I can still hit return, and the cursor moves down one line, and 
> Ctrl-Alt-Del reboots it.

Sounds very familiar to me.  I was about to post the following when I saw 
your message:

I've been a UNIX admin (mostly Solaris) for many years, but am relatively 
new to Linux and need some pointers from the old hands. We have three 1u 
servers running FC5 that are used as name servers.  All three machines are 
identical hardware:

Intel SCB2 Motherboard
1200 Chassis
BIOS 8CB20.86B.0065.P19.0208221005
Dual Pentium III 1.2 GHz
2 GB RAM
2 80 GB IDE drives
Promise FastTrack 100 Controller configured for RAID 1

I recently updated one of the machines from Fedora Core 
2.6.16-1.2133_FC5smp to 2.6.17-1.2157_FC5smp.

Quiet mode is disabled in grub.conf.  Under 2.6.16-1.2133_FC5smp, reboots 
occasionally (maybe 1 time out of 10) hang at "Making device-mapper 
control node".  It's annoying, but not crippling.  However after the 
update to 2.6.17-1.2157_FC5smp, reboots *always* hang at that point.

For the time being I have reverted to 2.6.16-1.2133_FC5smp, but I don't 
like the prospect of not being able to update the kernel beyond that 
version.  Any ideas on what might be causing this and what I can do to get 
around it will be greatly appreciated.

-- 
Chip Old (Francis E. Old)             E-Mail:  fold at bcpl.net
BCPL Network Administrator            Phone:   410-887-6180
BCPL.NET Internet Services Manager    FAX:     410-887-2091
320 York Road
Towson, MD 21204-5179  US