Hi All,

I've already posted the following problem on the Fedora Forums and didn't get a reply, so have decided to come back to LQ and try here in the hope someone can help

Fedora 16.x86_64
Kernel 3.3.2-6.fc16.x86_64
NVidia binary blob.

Well, I thought it would never happen to me, but I installed a kernel update 3 days ago and its borked my system - and as luck would have it, this is my pride-and-joy "production" machine... BAH.

On rebooting, I just got the message:

I had two old kernels available, but discovered I couldn't now boot from either of those either - I got the blue lines to indicate the OS was loading, but then at the end they froze. Checking the verbose output showed it was sticking at:

I burnt a copy of the DVD .ISO and booted off that into rescue mode... so far so good. I discovered there was an incomplete yum transaction pending. Running a quick

fixed that bit, but I was still unable to boot.

I was able to get an ethernet connection working, and ran yum-update and yum-upgrade much installed another new kernel, but still no joy. I tried running

for each of my three kernels in turn, but that told me that the kernel wasn't available.

I've tried a few things, and have ended up uninstalling both newer kernels, leaving me with just the one last known-good kernel. I checked that the initrd /boot/initramfs-kernel-version.img existed for the kernel version I was tying to boot in /boot/, but that all looked in order (I tried running dracut --force anyway).

At some point (I can't remember exactly where, and I'm not at the machine at the moment) I got this output that seems to show what the problem is:

So - my question is this - how do I reload (or rebuild?) that particular kernel module? Or is my system completely borked? I have to confess I'm rapidly reaching the outer limits of my Fedora knowledge on this one, and most fixes I've read assume the ability to choose a working kernel at the grub boot screen, which I don't have...

Help!

TIA,

itsjustarumour

You may have seen this by now, but just in case...

http://forums.fedoraforum.org/showthread.php?p=1574808

It might help.

Your problem reminds me of one I had some time back, but now I can't find any reference to it to see the solution would help, sorry.
If I do track anything down that is useful, I'll let you know.
Post the solution if you find it.

Cheers,
Terry

Looking at those kernel levels, they're not the latest anyway. I have 3.3.2-6, 3.3.0-4 and 3.2.10-3 - and I'm not too sure when I last accepted an update.

Normally (for Fedora) I'd reckon the VFS message indicates a broken initrd. Dracut will presumably only load modules for the current environment - where did you run it from ?.
Might be worth checking the UUIDs (from the liveCD in need) as suggested.

My thought is to boot from a live CD, chroot to the borked installation, back up any existing initramfs file (just in case, you know...), run dracut to regenerate the initramfs file, then reboot the system.

Thanks Terry, I just saw that. Theres a couple of suggestions there now so I'll see how I get on, and will post up here if I get things sorted.

Cheers,

Ian

Thanks for the tip syh00, I'll add that to my "things to try" list!

Btw - when I ran dracut, I'd used the DVD .ISO to go into rescue mode (the Fedora 16 CDR doesn't contain this functionality, have to use the DVD), done a "chroot /mnt/sysimage" and then run dracut from there.

Thanks for the tip RockDoctor, but that didn't fix things in my case...

Will post back with any updates. Glad for the help on this forum!

Oh well, never got to the bottom of this. Have just had to recover my data, and do a fresh install of the latest Fedora 17 RC.

Guess I'll just have to put it down to one of those occasional cases of spontaneous combustion, Fedora-stylee...