Lost boot capability after yum update
 

First thing, I'm completely new to Linux. I did a dual boot system install which both XP and Fedora resided happily on the same drive. After a day or so of figuring this and that out, for example fixing the baseurl= issues with yum or the add/remove programs feature, I was finally able to use yum to update. I did a full update, which took 45 minutes, and rebooted the system. I had Fedora 2.6.15 and updated to 2.6.18 FC5. Grub loaded fine, and once it loaded the X system, it would show the progress bar loading and before the login screen, it would error and put me to the shell prompt. I had one option to go to maintenance, but I have no idea how to do anything in there. I'm not sure how to pull any logs or files out to see if anything was there that pertained to what you guys have told others to do here in your forums. I am at a complete loss to what to do. Oh yeah, it happens as well when trying to boot to the old kernel. Any help would be appreciated. I can, if needed, try it again and handwrite everything down if I need to. Windows still boots, so I have access to the net.

Thank you very much in advance.

Joe

Sounds like there was an error in your x-server configuration.
I don't know what type of broadband you have, but 45 minutes for a full update on a system doesn't sound like a lot.
You could try logging in at the prompt and running another update like this:
(log in as root or yum will complain)

It might have been upwards to an hour or so for the update. I'm not sure I can do that command from the prompt, some of the other commands I tried, which worked in the terminal, have no effect in this shell prompt. For ex; when I would type yum, it says it can't open //etc/yum/yum.log or something similar.
When it does kick me out to the dos/shell prompt, one thing I noticed is that it says Error checking file structure/index or something similar. After work today, I need to sit down and write it all out. But I do have a 17mb/s connection and a Pentium D computer.

Anyways, as I'm trying to learn from all of this, I'm not impatient at all, so just letting you know that I'm not in a rush!

Thank you,
Joe

I wanted to let you guys know that I am reformatting the linux partition and installing the new fedora core 6. I do appreciate your time, and might even be back soon with more issues :D lol

Bear in mind FC6 is still 'unstable' and not all packages are available as yet...

Next time you run into a problem like this ona, if you don't want to do a fresh install you can always do a new install on top of the existing one. This will effectively repair the existing install (provided you are installing the same version number and not upgrading to the next one , e.g. FC5 to FC6). I didn't suggest doing this immediately because it's rather an ugly way of solving problems - but it works.