How do you clear a botched kernel on a PPC system?

[Kam Leo]

On Sat, Sep 26, 2009 at 5:05 PM, David Timms <dtimms at iinet.net.au> wrote:
> On 09/26/2009 08:27 PM, Joel Rees wrote:
>>
>> I find myself in another nice catch 22.
>
> ...
>>
>> So I'm having a hard time with things today. Can someone put me out of
>> my misery?
>
> Yeah, mate, take that .22 above and...
>
> No seriously:
>  Without having a ppc machine, I imagine that you can hit escape or any key
> during boot, so that you get the boot loader's option menu, and move the
> cursor to the previous kernel entry, hit enter...
>
> As long as the older working kernel is still installed, it should be enough
> to yum remove kernel.specific.bad.version, and the rpm should take care of
> setting the previous versions item as the one to boot.

For Fedora 11 the default maximum number of kernels for yum to keep
installed is set at 3. The two prior kernels plus the broken one
should be available.

Now, if you really care about what is happening to your system during
boot I recommend that you edit /boot/grub/grub.conf (alias menu.lst).
Comment out the "hiddenmenu" line (put a '#' in front of the 'h').
This will allow the other installed kernels and/OS's to be displayed
as selectable boot options. (Increase the number in the "timeout="
line if you want more time at making a selection.)  Delete "quiet" and
"rhgb" from all the kernel stanzas if you want to see additonal
details and status of drivers and services during the boot process.