Fedora not finishing booting anymore
 

I have been running fedora 11 for several months without a hiccup, but two days ago I ran "yum update" and installed whatever updates were available (I didn't pay attention to what they were). I was having problems with mysql so I tried "yum remove mysql" and then it removed mysql as well as quite a few unexpected dependencies. I then "yum install mysql" without a hitch and went about my way. However, when I next booted up my machine it got to "Starting preload dameon [OK]" and then it hangs with a flashing cursor on the screen.

I tried following http://dailypackage.fedorabook.com/i...ling-Grub.html but it didn't seem to make any difference. I put a new hard drive with WinXP on it into the same machine that I booted to, and I tried to use Ext2 Installable File System for Windows but when I run it, it only seems to see /boot and nothing else on the hard drive.

Any ideas?

Edit: I would either like to
A. recover data from my /home directory so that I can reinstall clean, or
B. fix whatever needs to be fixed so that I can have a usable linux box again.

Have you tried an interactive startup and simply accept the minimum?(disks)?
check /var/log/dmesg, and /var/log/messages

If you can get a live linux distro cd we can start to work with you if what business kid posted will not work for you.

this command "yum remove mysql" most likely removed a critical system file


can you boot into the install dvd in rescue mode and use nano to read the yum log file to see WHAT was uninstalled


but, if you do have a back up of your data, you might as well do a fresh install of fedora 12
fedora 11 is about to hit End of Life soon.

I wasn't able to get into interactive startup. I pressed 'i' when prompted but it just went on with its normal boot sequence.

I do have a live version of FC11 available, but I don't have anyway currently to burn the full DVD install.

New update: I dont know how I didn't try this sooner, but I just booted into runlevel 3. I was able to do a "startx" and it loaded me into gnome, though I typically run KDE. Maybe something is wrong with KDE?

Warning: Unless you logged in a yourself, you have started GNOME (a GUI) running as "root." Connecting to the Internet and/or opening a Web page, with "root" permissions active, can, potentially, compromise your system's security.

In any case, look a the contents of /var/log/yum.log to see exactly which programs were removed when you removed mysql. Then (since you've already re-installed mysql) just install those other programs that required mysql to be able to run.

You could also run the chkconfig command (see man chkconfig for details) to see which services are started at run level 5 that aren't started at run level 3. Then try starting each of them (/etc/init.d/<name> start) to see which, if any, error messages are displayed.

Re your other problem (the "Press 'I' for an interactive startup" thing), that option has not worked in Fedora releases since, IIRC, Fedora 10. I looked at the initialization file, and they expect a flag (/var/run/confirm) to be set, and the touch /var/run/confirm command seems to be missing.

I followed PTrenholme's advice and checked out /var/log/yum.log and found that kdebase-workspace and a few other KDE related packages had been removed when I uninstalled mysql. I will not make that mistake again. I am back up and running. Thank you for your help. I've never had to dig through those log files before so it was nice to have pointers as to where to look.

I am still curious as to why I wouldn't have been able to see anything except the /boot partition when I ran Ext2IFS from a harddrive in the same machine running windows?

For now, a tough reminder to always backup your important files just in case.

from a windows box ( even with the ext2 and ext3 programs)
it will not be able to read the ext4 in fedora 11
the /boot in fedora 11 was still ext3 ( in 12 it is ext4)

Its not ext4. I originally installed Fedora 9 and upgraded several times, but I have never formatted since.