OK. Either I screwed or I have a hardware problem ( failing harddisk )

Anyway here is what I did.
I upgraded my 64-bit Fedora core 3 to FC4 using yum. Lots of old fc3 packages were left so I startd to remove them by yum.

Finally there were only some glibc packages left.

For that I used
rpm -e --nodeps glibc...

Gnome terminal stopped working. I could still use my firefox browser for browsing webpages. Then suddenly that stopped working. I though I was being hacked. Tried to bring up console ctrl+alt+f1 and it seemed to work. Logged in but then i get only lots of those tty messages ( don't remember exactly what the textwas ). Anyway console was also unusable. Decided to reboot. That didn't get longer that to quitting xorg. It was reset button time.

And here I am asking help for system not being able to boot.

Kernel panic /sbin/init failed Tryed to kill init.

Used also my fc3 dvd to boot in rescue mode and modified the init scripts
like
echo $"Script works this far"

but my texts doesn't show up.

So is my initrd bootimage messed up or is this all caused by removing fc3 glibc packages ?

Is it possible with only fc4 rescue cd to get my linux os working again or do I have to download the whole DVD iso first?

I get my kernel upgraded to 2.6.15-1.1831 and rescue cd have an older image right?

And yes. I have removed old fc3 kernels so they can't help me either.

Could it be possible to boot with fc4 rescue cd and then do that chroot /mnt/sysimage/

and then use yum install initscripts ?

I also have kernel sources installed and have copy of my old 2.6.15 kernel .config file but recompiling kernel with rescue cd isn't possible right?

Somewhere I read that it would be possible copy kernel boot images from rescue cd to harddrive and then add boot lines to grub.conf file. I propably stored the link with my failing fc4 OS so I would like to get that link if anybody knows it or what things to do when copying vmlinuz from rescue cd.


Okay and as fc5 is just around a corner which one would you suggest. Do I later download the whole fc4 dvd image or fc5 dvd image? I need something in 64-bit os where eclipse is working and some UML modelling tools. MIDI editors are also desirable.

OK. Thank you for your time.

And BTW explain me correct way to upgrade from fc3 glibc packages to fc4 glibc packages so that I can remove any fc3 packages.

Yeah, well, glibc is pretty important for the health of your system as I am sure you have found. You can expect that not much of anything will work.

I suggest downloading FC4 cdroms (or dvd) and choosing the 'upgrade' install option. Hopefully this will save you from having to do a full reinstall.

Could it be possible to boot with fc4 rescue cd and then do that chroot /mnt/sysimage/
That's possible, you'll need network access to a mirror or stash the packages local. If inside the chroot nothing works because of missing /lib/ld.so etc, etc you could copy the /lib dir from the CDROM to /some/dir and export LD_LIBRARY_PATH or use the rpm command from the CDROM and use --dbpath and --root.

Thank you for your replies. Well unfortunately not even chroot command worked ( couldn't find sh ). I burned the whole dvd and made upgrade install.

That caused problem that yum and python couldn't work together. Have to remove yum and python packages with rpm ( luckily that worked ).
Then install Python packages back again with rpm and then yum.

Get rid of old fc3 glibc by first force installing fc4 glibc and then removing fc3 glic with rpm. This is propably the best way to handle removeing old version of glibc. There are still some script issues and openoffice2 installation isn't working anymore but browsing and application installation now works.