Re: tlug: RH boot freeze

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <turnbull@example.com>]

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tlug note from "Stephen J. Turnbull" <turnbull@example.com>
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>>>>> "Totoro" == Totoro  <riley@example.com> writes:

    Totoro> I upgraded a couple of things on RH 4.0 this afternoon,

What did you change?

    Totoro> and on restart it stopped while calling the system loggers
    Totoro> after going to runlevel 3. The 3-finger salute shuts
    Totoro> things down, but I'm still unable to run Linux. :-(

    Totoro> I have other boot disks, etc. Does anyone know how to fix
    Totoro> this from a rescue disk? TIA!!

Well, for the moment you should be able to limp along with the rescue
disk by mounting your real root somewhere like /mnt and going from
there (fix your PATH to prefix /mnt to all absolute paths...).  It
must be possible somehow to unmount the RAMdisk or floppy from root
and remount your root device on /, but I don't know how.  (There's a
chicken and egg problem since mount lives on a disk....)

Your rescue disk should also support boot: linux root=/dev/hda1 (or
wherever your normal root device is), but in this case you will
probably run into the same kind of crash landing.  Try it anyway....

To really fix it, you should read the RedHat Errata file and see if it 
seems to relate (I think it lives in the updates directory); you
probably did something out of order or omitted to upgrade something
that depends on the version of something else (typically the kernel).
Then you may be able to upgrade your way out of it.

Failing that, deinstall the offensive package upgrades and reinstall
the working versions (if you can find the old versions).

Failing that, do a minimum "upgrade" reinstall (don't select any
packages in the install script).  That may break some of your local
scripts and lilo configuration (if you multiboot, if not it doesn't
matter; either way, tar up /etc before you do this and stash it in a
safe place), but at least you should have a bootable system.

Failing that, post the list of everything you upgraded and (if you can 
get your hands on /var/log/messages and /var/log/syslog, whatever you
have on your system) the log messages starting from "LILO".  This will 
probably take longer, though....

Good luck.

Steve

P.S.  This just goes to prove that attending TLUG meetings is good for
your system's health; *I* went to the TLUG meeting yesterday and
didn't break one single thing on my system!  In your case (you're in
Aomori, right?), I guess it would save your system for most of three
days!  :-P
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