Fedora Users — Re: How do a fix a non working kernel installation ?

On Fri, Jul 17, 2009 at 1:19 AM, Seann Clark <nombrandue@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

linux guy wrote:

No joy. All I got was the same blinking cursor. I'm running from the
F9 Live CD.

BTW: chroot above was actually /usr/sbin/chroot. And the yum problem
with the repos wasn't the repos at all. The chroot session doesn't
have access to the network. ping www.google.com returns "unknown
host" in the chroot session, whereas its found from a non chroot
session.

yum -C list kernel shows only the two F11 kernels. The F12 kernel is gone.

However, if I look at grub. conf in /media/-/boot, the entry for the
F12 kernel is still there ! Furthermore so are the F12 kernel files.
So I am guessing that rpm didn't remove any of the actual files, even
though it seems to have removed all of the database entries. GREAT !
I've got a mess on my hands.

This makes sense, because if I do a cd /boot from the chroot session,
it shows a blank directory. However, if I cd to /media/-/boot, its
definitely not empty.

I think I need to link the /boot directory to /media/-/boot and then
to an rpm -i against the F12 kernel rpm to reinstall the entries into
the database and then do a rpm -e to actually remove the files.

Does that make sense ? Is there an easier way ?

Thanks

HOWEVER....

On 7/16/09, linux guy <linuxguy123@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

I think I got it fixed. Here is what I did in case someone needs it someday
:)

- booted F9 Live. Just because I had it around.
- opened Dolphin, because it displays the hard drives for the machine
- opened a terminal in Dolphin
- browse to the root directory of the hard drive
- did a pwd in the terminal and found the root of my hard drive was
/media/-/
- su
- chroot /media/-/
- yum -C list kernel <- did -C because the Fedora repos seem to be
messed up again, thus I only used the local cache data
- yum -C remove kernel-2.6.31-0.69.rc3.fc12
- this resulted in an error due to some unrelated pooched dependencies.
- rpm -e kernel-2.6.31-0.69.rc3.fc12
- this resulted in an error due to some unrelated pooched dependencies
- rpm --nodeps -e kernel-2.6.31-0.69.rc3.fc12
- rpm -e kernel-firmware-2.6.31-0.69.rc3.fc12

I will now reboot and see if my system runs. I'll report back in a
bit if it does.

On 7/16/09, linux guy <linuxguy123@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Will chroot work when the target system has a broken kernel ? It
keeps running the old kernel ?

I tried using rpm with --dbpath so that it used the F11 rpm data. It
wouldn't run because of incompatible rpm versions.

On 7/16/09, davide <lists4davide@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

linux guy <linuxguy123 <at> gmail.com> writes:

I am now running from a Fedora 9 live CD I had laying around. I can
see the hard drive and its partitions from the live session. How
would I fix the F11 installation so it runs again ? Is it possible to
do an rpm -e on the non running F11 partition from the F9 live session
?

You can take control of the installed linux from a live cd with the
chroot
command using the command line.
But you should know what you are doing.
Basically it is very simple and powerful, but for this reason you can
also
break
your system.

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To fix Grub fast and easy, after editing the kernel grouping, or anything else out of /boot/grub/grub.conf, you can grab a livecd that works good on fixing a broken grub boot, called super grub disk (I have used it plenty of times when a borked boot of a fedora box happened to me) and it works great. Biggest thing I can think of is edit grub.conf, and change the default to a known good kernel and remove the bad kernel out. That is to say you have a good one you can boot off of still on the system....

~Seann

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It definately seems like your grub configuration was "borked" and not much more. The files of your previous versions are still there (it seems as the directory is populated with many files) and in their proper place (though when using the live CD you see them under /media....) so you need to add one of the older kernel entries back into your grub.con file pointing to the normal location. I wil post here the latest entry for my grub.conf and you can substitute your kernel version specifics as needed....

# grub.conf generated by anaconda
#
# Note that you do not have to rerun grub after making changes to this file
# NOTICE: You have a /boot partition. This means that
# all kernel and initrd paths are relative to /boot/, eg.
# root (hd0,0)
# kernel /vmlinuz-version ro root=/dev/VolGroup00/LogVol00
# initrd /initrd-version.img
#boot=/dev/sda
default=0
timeout=5
splashimage=(hd0,0)/grub/splash.xpm.gz
hiddenmenu
title Fedora (2.6.29.5-191.fc11.i586)
root (hd0,0)
kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.29.5-191.fc11.i586 ro root=UUID=ec9b81f9-3160-4b45-9d1b-f42c934fbb60 rhgb quiet vga=0x318
initrd /initrd-2.6.29.5-191.fc11.i586.img

I hope that this helps and you do not end up going through a much more painful clean re-install process. I suspect that all you do need to do is to make an appropriate grub.conf file with your existing kernel and init image file entries located in /media/-/boot/. The real location on booting without the liveCD will be in /boot/. Of course your grub loader located on the MBR might also have an issue and there, hopefully, the live cd should have some way to reinitialize the mbr with the grub loader.

Best of luck,

fennix

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