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

[John Summerfield]

Bill Crawford wrote:
> 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?

I have not.

> 
>> 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.

I have tried several kernels, none works. I'm beginning to suspect it's 
mkinitrd that is broken.

At this stage in the f9 cycle, we were on 2.6.25 kernels that would not 
boot on my system and on several others. Some of these problems were due 
to mkinitrd brokenness. Mine was a kernel bug, it wasn't finding my SATA 
hard disks. However, there were messages signaling something amiss - it 
couldn't pivot_root to the booted system.

> 
>> 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.
> 


-- 

Cheers
John

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