FC5 unbootable after yesterday's updates [Solved]

[Claude Jones]

Claude Jones wrote:
| Just to update. Ran Spinrite on the drive last night, and it
| found no problems. So this appears to be a corruption of FC5.
| Probing for cause now.
| 

I have found a solution with the help of some off-list advice. I
post it for the sake of others this may happen to. I received the
following suggestion off-list:

"Hi Claude:
  Since I don't know how to post a message to the fedora list in
response to 
your posting, here a private response.
  I had the same problem the last two days, also since using yum
to update 
FC5.  For me libpam.so was missing.  Yesterday I put in the FC5
disk, 
started in rescue mode and was able to copy the missing library
over from 
the disk's /lib to the /mnt/system(?)/lib of my hard drive.  The
libpam.so.0 
file was a symbolic link in /lib to /lib/libpam.so.0.81.0 (I don't
remember 
the number),.  There is also a symbolic link from /usr/lib to 
/lib/libpam.so.0.  That link existed still, but the computer
noticed that 
the target file was missing.  I don't remember the details (my
computer is 
also at home while I'm at work), but if you compare the /lib and
the 
/mnt/sytem(?)/lib directories, you might figure out what file is
missing.  
Luckily the libpam.so version hadn't changed yet.  I think today
some 
upgrade also installed a new libpam version.  In that case I'd
might still 
be stuck.
  I'm no computer expert, and I don't know at all what happened.
I just 
know that I copied
that libpam file over and my computer is running again.
  Good luck!
    --- Johannes Bauer"

I couldn't figure out how to copy the file from the DVD disk to my
filesystem. I decided to try a yum update in rescue mode, just to
see what got pulled in. There was a lot of stuff that supposedly
was being updated when my system updated the other evening, so I
guess I still have problems. I cancelled the update before
execution, but, I did notice that pam was one of the updates. I
tried a "yum install pam" without running any of the other
updates. That installed successfully, and on reboot, my machine
came up, without any of the errors I described in my original
post. 

I don't exactly understand what happened during the original
update, but it would appear that the process was
interrupted/corrupted in some way, and didn't properly finish. I
imagine there's some cleanup to be done, but I have the machine
back, now. Thanks to Johannes Bauer for suggesting this avenue of
investigation!


Claude Jones
Levit & James, Inc./WTVS
Leesburg, VA, USA