I upgraded aaa_elflibs as per Eric's advice here:

http://alien.slackbook.org/blog/huge...-to-my-laptop/

Now I can't access anything... it boots into tty1 and won't mount any of my logical volumes! Can somebody please help?

Any error messages?

Unfortunately this damn thing boots too fast to make out very much, but I could see that it refused to mount the volume group that contains everything except the root directory and the /boot directory. Just looking at the stuff above the login prompt I have stuff such as:

Every time it tries to enter any directory you get a similar message.

This is arguably the worst balls-up I've had in five years of running Linux. Hope to god I'm not facing a reinstall...

When you boot, you can press the "pause"-key to pause the output.

Wow... doessn't pause it for very long, though, does it? One thing I got out of it this time: every time it tries to mount one of my LVM partitions it says that "the superblock could not be read or does not contain a correct ext2". Huh???

Was your kernel updated? Perhaps you have to rebuild your initrd? Or your have you checked the settings of your boot manager?

I don't think the kernel was updated. I wouldn't have the first clue how to go about rebuilding initrd or messing with boot manager settings.

Just to clarify... I'd already upgraded my box, and everything worked except X. The above link suggested that the problem was that aaa_elflibs was blacklisted and therefore missed in the upgrades. So I upgraded that package only... and that's when the XXXX hit the fan.

Did a little google searching, and then some poking around in what little filesystem I have left. Turns out I don't even have a /boot/initrd.gz file. I tried to view the initrd README in the /boot directory but of course I can't access vim... because my /usr partition is no longer mounted. AHHHHH!!!!!

Why not use the slackware live cd to read the readme, and to build your initrd?

Last I checked there wasn't a slackware live cd. If you mean the install CD I don't know whatever became of that... but I'm in the process of downloading another one right now. Because unless I can get this fixed in the next hour or so I'm fully expecting to have to reinstall the OS.

You're down in Alec? Worst case, you'll need to obtain enough beer to lure me there. ;-)

How much beer is that? If someone could save me from having to reinstall the OS and every single bit of extra software I've got on this thing the beer would definitely be on me...

Hehe... not sure how much that would actually be. ;-)

It does sound like you have a fairly typical broken-initrd-failure, though, and once you get the kernel/initrd updated (and containing LVM support if you need that), things should mostly work for you. As far as aaa_elflibs, there is no way that should have caused the problem. Well, unless you installed the x86_64 aaa_elflibs on an i486 system, in which case all bets are off (but like most issues, there are ways to fix that too).

If your root partition is a regular partition, you can use the install disc to boot it. Try something like this on the boot: prompt:

huge.s rdinit= root=/dev/sda3 (or whatever) ro

Certainly if you can get logged into your system again that way, any repairs will be a lot easier than if you work off the installer's ramdisk.

Good luck!

God no... it's a _64 package on a _64 system.

Anyway... I followed your instructions above, and I was able to log in. I'm not sure what to do now, however. How does one go about rebuilding one's initrd?

Perhaps first things first... if you didn't have any idea how to make an initrd before, I'm going to step out on a limb and guess that you did not previously have one. So rather than consider the pros and cons of using an initrd versus using the huge kernel, probably we should start by getting you back where you were. So...

First, make sure that the new 2.6.35.7 kernel packages are installed, and make sure that /etc/lilo.conf is pointing to the new huge kernel in /boot (either by using the full filename, or by making sure if lilo.conf uses a symlink, that it points to the right kernel). Then run "lilo" as root, and you should be good to reboot without the disc.

Assuming that works, you can check out README.initrd in /usr/doc/mkinitrd[...] at your leisure.

Hope this helps.