upgrade to 11.4 fails to boot, system hangs......

Hello all,

I attempted to upgrade my 11.3 box to 11.4 using the downloaded DVD. It gave a warning prior to initiating the upgrade that said my disk driver may need to be replaced prior to the upgrade as there was no consistency between versions, something to that effect.

I took a leap of faith and initiated the upgrade which seemed to go well except when it rebooted, my system hung. I believe it requires a different disk driver and that the warning message gave the the clue. However I am not fluent in the configuration files involved or where they are located and which line must be edited so I am requesting help. Nor am I sure that this in fact is the problem, but I suspect it as the emergency repair program can access the drives.

I was able to boot into maintenance mode and able to mount the volumes looking up from an 11.0 “bible” book the correct syntax to do so. Therefore I can access whatever config files if I know where to look. Is it possible to initiate upon boot up a log file that I can refer to for checking at which point the system hung? Doing so will give me a clue where to begin. NO?

Also I am not versed in the use of the native text editors and wonder if someone can recommend which one is user friendly that the maintenance boot has installed? I had a hell of a time editing with

Any help is greatly appreciated as I had begun using this system as a daily workstation after my windows xp system died on me. It was a synch server for my workstation and has all my data on it. I also have a backup of my data already.

The reason I need to backup is that once I switched over to it as my daily workstation I had a need to install software that would give me the functionality of my old xp box (a screen capture utility, media player, upgraded browser, anti-virus, spyware, etc.). I found when I tried to do these install/upgrades, the upgrade program would fail, unable to find files it needed. I have since concluded that these files or repositories changed or changed locations since this version is already old and the needed repositories no longer exist in their default location. Hence the need to upgrade. I also want to take it to 21.1 after this which will probably bring up more issues, but one step at at time.

Thanks,

Tony

On 2012-04-10 08:36, therrera wrote:
>
> Hello all,
>
> I attempted to upgrade my 11.3 box to 11.4 using the downloaded DVD.

There is some documentation here of the procedure and how to solve some of
the problems:

Offline upgrade method

> It gave a warning prior to initiating the upgrade that said my disk
> driver may need to be replaced prior to the upgrade as there was no
> consistency between versions, something to that effect.

Having the exact error message would be interesting.

> Is it possible to initiate upon boot up a log file that I can refer to
> for checking at which point the system hung? Doing so will give me a
> clue where to begin. NO?

Assuming you mounted the root filesystem on /mnt, the file would be
/mnt/var/log/boot.msg, and perhaps /mnt/var/log/messages

> Also I am not versed in the use of the native text editors and wonder
> if someone can recommend which one is user friendly that the maintenance
> boot has installed? I had a hell of a time editing with

The easiest in my opinion is “mcedit”, but I don’t think it is included in
the rescue media. The next is “joe”, which in a normal system can also be
called as jstar, jmacs, jpico, each having a different behaviour to adapt
to the user preferences. In the rescue system I think it is joe only. It
has help (control-K H). Other easy editor is pico, but I don’t remember if
it is available.


Cheers / Saludos,

Carlos E. R.
(from 11.4 x86_64 “Celadon” at Telcontar)