F10Alpha- Kernels deleted wrongly, left with just a dud.

[Bill Crawford]

On 16/09/2008, John Summerfield <debian at herakles.homelinux.org> wrote:
> atm I cannot boot the system in question.
>
> At some point, having had the system running for a week or two and
> applied lotsa updates, I discovered the kernel I booted was no longer
> installed. (Evil, Debian does not do that).
>
> Quick workaround, reboot.
>
> I discovered that, contrary to my belief about how many kernels I should
> have, there was in fact only one (this system was originally installed
> about f8alpha or beta), and I had a period where there was a succession
> of dud kernels so I configured yum to preserve lots (and then rpm
> --erased --justdb for good measure).

Way out suggestion: you didn't have a separately mounted /boot that
has somehow become unmounted, and the new kernel written into the
/boot on the root partition?

> Having one kernel would not be a serious problem but for the fact it
> does not get past the initrd, as far as I can see. There's a message
> about creating /dev nodes (or some such) and the system proceeds no
> further. Booting with "init=/bin/bash" does not get any further.

Possibly very broken initrd missing some modules you need? Anyway, the
OP's advice about reinstalling the known working kernel from rescue
mode seems good.

> System hardware: HP DC7700 Intel vPro E6300 CPU etc etc.
>
> I'm not in a position to give much info on this atm as it doesn't boot.