2.6.14-1.1696_FC5 installs but kernel crashes on boot

[Andy Burns]

Dave Jones wrote:

> There's a test kernel at http://people.redhat.com/davej/kernels/Fedora/devel/
> which has a new boot time option "nowprodata" which disables it at runtime

OK, I got somewhere and nowhere with that, but probably my fault!

I booted into repair mode,
chrooted into /mnt/sysimage
did a wget on kernel-smp-2.6.14-1.1707_FC5.i686.rpm

But rpm refused to install the new kernel, errors about unable to run 
the %pre script, I tried with --nopre (or whatever!) and then got cpio 
errors instead, so I attempted to manually bodge the new kernel into 
place ...

Did an rpm2cpio on the new kernel
used cpio to extract files into /boot and /lib/modules
ran a depmod -a and mkinitrd for the new version
added a new entry into grub.conf with the nowprodata option
took a deep breath and rebooted and picked the new kernel

Well 1707_FC5 certainly got past the point where 1696_FC5 hung :-)

It managed to load a few .ko files (so I didn't completely barf up the 
initrd.img file) but it couldn't mount /root and eventually paniced :-(