Kernel update broke my system.

[M A Young]

On Fri, 29 May 2009, Wendell Nichols wrote:

> While I was conducting a web meeting with a number of people yesterday my 
> keyboard stopped working.  Thats the second time its happened and I was 
> forced to reboot!  Imagine my acute frustration that because of a kernel 
> update the boot loader failed and I was left with a blinking cursor!  While 
> 10 people patiently waited on the phone I had to boot the installer and go 
> through the "change boot loader" part of an os upgrade.  Luckly that worked 
> and I was back in business in about 15 minutes.
> I suspect that all my raving about the stability of linux over windows is now 
> the source of some humor in my company and the 3 other companies represented 
> on the call....
>
> The kernel update that "got me" was:  kernel-2.6.27.19-170.2.35.fc10.x86_64
> ackkptewee :-)
> wcn

I suspect the problem here is that when you last updated the OS grub 
wasn't updated properly, meaning that the boot sector part of grub was 
looking for the stage2 file at one location of the disk but this was now 
blank space from the filesystem point of view. From then on, whenever you 
updated your kernel, or did something else in the /boot filesytem, you ran 
the risk of overwriting this data and killing grub.

 	Michael Young