Last night, I apparently shut down my computer while it was still doing an auto update, and it turns out that one of the updates was a new kernel. So when I turned my computer on this morning, opensuse wouldn’t boot, and I am currently stuck using windows.
At the grub command line,
root (hd0,1)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz
gives me the normal results, except that “vmlinuz” is followed by a new version number. However, when I do
initrd /boot/initrd
I get a file not found error. The only initrd file in /boot is a link, and there is no real initrd file with a version number after it. If I ask grub to boot after doing all this, I get a kernel panic.
How can I solve this? Would it be easiest just to upgrade the system to opensuse 11.2 (it’s currently 11.1)? If so, should I ask the installer to “install” or “repair?” Is there a simpler way of doing this without doing an install that will probably force me to tweak a whole bunch of other things?
I’m sure you will get better answers than what I can offer - but I’m watching the thread to see who pops in and what they say.
All I can add is that I remember “hearing” (on forums) some old-timers say it was usually better to re-install than to upgrade. Which seems to fit with my experience this year. Fedora 10–11, failed; Vector kernel upgrade failed; Debian Lenny to Testing failed. Ubuntu 9.04 to 9.1 succeeded for me, but the forums were hot with complaints when it came out. Right now I’ve got to revive the machine I was running Debian on - it killed xserver somehow. I know it is related to my nvidia card, but a reinstall of the drivers and reconfig didn’t fix it, so I’m tempted to just install suse 11.2.
if you can get to grub then you should be able to select what kernel you want to use. ( As long as they didn’t recently implement deleting the old kernel with updates )
Check to see if the old kernel is listed, it will have a lower number and select that option of booting it with Opensuses from the grub menu
Thanks, but only the new kernel is there, no backup. (I probably should have backed up the kernel manually, but it’s too late now.) I’ve looked both in the grub menu and by booting from a cd, mounting my hard drive and looking at the files in /boot. The new kernel is there, no old kernel, and no initrd at all.
I’m going to try the repair function on the opensuse 11.1 dvd and see if I have any luck. If anyone else has any ideas, I’d be glad to hear them…
I’ve tried the repair function on the 11.1 dvd, which initially seems to figure things out: it tries to reinstall the kernel and a few other packages. Weirdly, after installing the packages and finishing, the repair program dumps me into a text mode program that says the installation failed. If I look in /boot, still the same files: new kernel, no initrd. If I run the repair program again, the same thing happens.
I also tried going to a command line from the installation dvd and doing
mount -t ext3 /dev/sda2 /mnt
chroot /mnt
/sbin/mkinitrd
but this failed as well, no files in /boot were changed.
Any chance someone has a brilliant idea to fix things before I wipe the partition and have to reinstall everything?
