I've been running Fedora Core 4 on a Compaq DeskPro for several months with no real problems to speak of. Yesterday I used YumEx to update the system (which I do regularly) then again to remove several apps and language packs for SE Asia languages in an attempt to recover some disk space. All seemed to go well but later in the day the system froze. Keyboard and mouse completely locked out, no network access to the filesystem through SAMBA (no problems before), no audible disk activity, no disk LED activity, and network LED steady on. I finally resorted (gulp) to pressing the off button. Didn't have to hold it in, the computer just immediately turned off. I thought maybe that was good news, like it had just powered down (oh, the screen was completely blank but I assumed that was screen saver power down and without keyboard or mouse input, I couldn't power it up) but not off. When I powered up, seemed to get normal initialization messages on screen then the following error:

/bin/sh: ro: No such file or directory
Kernel panic - not syncing: Attempted to kill init!

And nothing. I tried linux rescue and fsck on the lvm volume with no errors reported. When I do an ls the /bin/sh file is there. And that's about as much as I know how to do. I know databases and I can do desktop sorts of stuff but boot process information isn't making sense to me. Would anybody be willing to lead me by the hand?
I'd really appreciate it.
Thanks.
Randy

I'll bet YumEx did a partitial update of the $Bash package.........and left it incomplete.......

Any clues on how to fix it without doing a complete reinstall? Actually, I did a an "update" from the original FC 4 CDs -- which should have overwritten the core, including bash, I would have thought -- to no effect. If I can't find an answer by tomorrow morning, it'll be hose it all and reinstall time. :-(
Randy