openSuSe 11.2 update failed and now server won't boot - urgent help needed!

English Install/Boot/Login
1

Hi,

I really hope someone can give me help with the problem I have with my server.

I had problems with dual screen setup which I couldn’t fix properly and found that in 11.2 there is xrandr tool used instead of SaX2. Problem started when I updated from 11.1 to 11.2 using network update (downloaded ISO image without rpms - 11.2 has been released some time ago so most of the rpms would had to be updated anyway thus why not from the very beginning… major mistake, it seems). Update started fine. Something like 1300+ rpms were being updated. I let the computer do the thing (couple of hours).

When I eventually returned to check how is the update going I found out that computer had crashed. System has been very solid (except ATI’s graphic driver part) thus I highly doubt any HW problems. After reset tried to repair installation and some things got fixed but not all (noscp and pattern_openSUSE_enhanced… were never installed - maybe something else as well). Tried rebooting: blank. Retry on repair, boot: blank (despite whether openSUSE or openSUSE failsafe was chosen).

Then tried installing again. Installed several missing rpms (oss and non-oss). Reboot: blank.

After several automatic and manual fixes (which always left those couple of rpms uninstalled even though it said: downloading (100%), installing (100%), updating files) the result remained the same: blank.

Then I managed to get another computer connected to the network, downloaded full 11.2 image and tried to repair from DVD. No luck. Same situation.

Repair tool also pretty much always find errors from sda3 (system disk) and fixes them. And always finds errors from bootloader, fixes them, finds same errors again and fixes them again. Are these error real or not, if so are they fixed or not?

Last tests what I did was BIOS setting changes. PnP OS was set to disable. ACPI support disabled. Also changed failsafe kernel parameters (noacpi and vga=textmode). After that I was able to see that kernel is indeeded loaded and started to some extent. Start up ends in:

[0.30xxxxx] io scheduler cfq registered

So, can anyone help with the problem?

Most of the important data is luckily on RAID arrays (sdb and sdc) but unfortunately /etc/* is on sda3. I managed to take tar-backup of it but it still resist on same drive (several copies: /tmp, /opt, /home.bak).

It’s important to get the server back up online because my e.g. my mail server is down and cannot receive any mails at the moment…

Mboard: Asus M3A-H/HDMI
CPU: AMD 4850X2

2

At this moment, IMHO you have already done far too much to save the system with some advice. If I were you I’d do a clean 11.2 install, with original BIOS settings. First thing you should see to, is to have a backup outside your system, you should have one anyway. RAID is not some backup solution, you still need to backup, backup, backup.

3

Did you try to boot to runlevel 3 (or even to runlevel 1) ? Can you see some messages during the boot process?

4

Tried with runlevel 1 but same thing. I don’t think kernel is at that stage yet that runlevel option would have any impact.

Hope reinstall is not the only solution. It’s not that easy to take backups anymore because I cannot boot up the system anymore to be able to write CD/DVD. Maybe some of those Live-distros have DVD burner SW…

I have to say that I’ve been rather disappointed to my openSuSe voyage so far. Started with 9-something. There were some issues. Updated to 10.x (don’t recall exactly versions) - issues still. Then came 11-series (.0, .1 and now .2) where KDE was updated to 4.3 and lately to 4.4. There has been a lot of memory leaks (Plasma, X as well (maybe related to plasma), Firefox etc.), instability issues (difficult to say from where but definitely from ATI driver has been a reason for few crashes) and changes that don’t make much of a sense.

Changes between updates (not even between distro version but updates of KDE, Qt… etc.) - couple of examples:
-“start” menu search changed way of operation time to time: when menu was opened search was active, other times search had to be clicked before it was active, back and forth…
-search used to find applications by their name but suddenly it changed to description search

Other notes:
-display settings have never worked well (especially with dual head solutions)
-Pulse audio has been working so and so (does not work out of the box with every available player; sometime volume is zerod for certain player (like xine))
-sometimes updated packages are changed so much that the previous configuration does not work anymore (has happened few times with postfix alone) but this is not notified before, during or after update (very annoying to find out that mails have stopped comming because updated package no longer accept the old configuration and it has not been “converted” to new format).

What comes to instability then my comparison goes back to the days with Fedora. In my previous server (server has always been a workstation for me as well - don’t like to power up winblows machine unless necessary) my best updatime was around a year (350+ days, IIRC) but so far the best uptime with openSuSe has been less than 50days.

So, if I have to reinstall the OS I really have to think whether it’ll be 11.2 or something else. There are good things in openSuSe (Pacman repositories for one, latest KDE [not fond of gnome], latest SW in general) but there are bad ones like this episode and things mentioned above. I haven’t been able to try 11.2 yet so cannot really say if it is any better than 11.1 I’ve been using. openSuSe is nice but it simply variates from quality point of view too much to my liking.

Before openSuSe I got fed up with Fedora because they dropped the support for older distro very quickly. I didn’t want to update all the time. openSuSe is better in this respect. I also tried Ubuntu and Mandriva but neither was to my liking - meant to be workstations but not servers (I need both). PCOS2007 was one as well but that was way too immature at the time.