Latest Kernel causes reboot hell

[Chris]

On Mon, 07 Dec 2009 18:06:12 -0500
Sam Varshavchik <mrsam at courier-mta.com> wrote:

> Chris writes:
> 
> > After running 12 for some weeks now, I allowed yum to install the
> > newest kernel (well, as of Friday of course). 
> > 
> > all seemed to go just fine until I rebooted.  All the machine will
> > do is continue to reboot itself over and over again. 
> > 
> > I reinstalled and applied only updates other then 3 that were
> > particular to the new kernel and all went well there. Rebooted just
> > fine.
> > 
> > I thought - why not try the remaining 3 and lets see if for some
> > reason the others might be causing this effect.
> > 
> > That didn't seem to help - again, after allowing yum to install the
> > new kernel, it sent the machine into reboot hell.
> > 
> > The box is only a few years (3) old, it's a Sony Vaio desktop. It's
> > running sata, there is a /boot part of some 200 meg (only 23% full)
> > and the rest of the 400 gig drive is LVM
> > 
> > Currently, I tossed on Ubuntu just so I can get some work done
> > however, would really prefer to be back running F12.
> > 
> > Any help/ideas would be great.
> 
> Some time ago, in F9-F10 era, there was a consecutive series of about
> four kernels that were released that could not boot on one of my
> machines. Somehow, I managed to survive this traumatic experience
> without installing a completely different distribution. I waved a
> magic wand, and continued to boot the last working kernel, until a
> new one came out that worked on my hardware once more.
> 
> 

I agree - quoting from Louis Lagendijk;

"The best way to avoid the problem might be to get grub to display the
list of installed (assuming that the original F12 kernel worked for you)
and select that kernel to boot from. Change the default line
in /etc/grub.conf to automate that....."

This seems to be the appropriate way for me to have handled it. Putting
on another distro worked for me at the time. My home dir and data are
on another sata drive so using a previously cloned image from
Clonezilla got me up and running in under 10 mins when I needed to get
some things done. Not meant to be long termed - but was a solution that
I knew at the time.

Fortunately (for me) I have a cloned-image of F12 from earlier in the
week I'll put back on and use the above mentioned work around in
addition to what you have said.

I too recall the issues of F9/F10 (I touched on that with Louis in a
private mail). In any event... Time to eat.

-- 
Best regards,

Chris