I did my usual apt-get upgrade yesterday. Running unstable and the name finally bit I think. There was a kernel-image upgrade and now with the 2.6.11 kernel, it won't boot. Same kernel number I think.

Some of the errors are:

sbin/init: 360: cannot open bin/root: no such file

then some stuff about creating devices then "kernel cannot convert a name into device number"

My system boots fine with an earlier kernel. So, two questions for you all:

1. Anyone else have this problem?

2. I thought I'd held/locked the kernel-image so it wouldn't upgrade. Obviously not. How can I do that?

Thanks!


Barbara

To answer #1, I run unstable, but compile my own kernel, so I couldn't have had this problem (although I've had many others with my own kernels ).

One thing I would suggest is leaving a relatively old kernel (2.4.something) as a backup choice for you to boot to, in case something ever happens. I leave 2.4.18-bf2.4 in my main system's boot menu for this very reason.

To answer #2, I believe this is specific to which program you use (aptitude, dselect, synaptic, etc). I don't know how to do it in regular apt-get / dpkg (if there is a way), but with aptitude you can say "aptitude hold pkgname", and I suspect synaptic's should be easy to find in the GUI. However, if you use another program to manage your package once, it will ignore the request to lock that package in the other program. For example, if you tell aptitude to hold the package, synaptic won't know anything about that "hold" status in aptitude, and will go through and upgrade the package you told aptitude to hold.

I believe this is how it works; if I'm wrong, hopefully someone else can enlighten us both.

Got exact same error after upgrading... first time this has happened to me. Somebody dropped the ball on a change...

Fortunately, debian.org quickly retracted the initrd changes and reposted --

http://packages.debian.org/unstable/utils/initrd-tools

I booted my machine using DamnSmallLinux, opened a terminal window, ran "sudo su" and ran "mount /dev/hda1 /mnt -o rw".

Ran "chroot" and then downloaded the new initrd .deb using Firefox. Ran dpkg -i to install new .deb.

Ran "mkinitrd -o /boot/initrd.img-2.6.11-1-386 2.6.11-1-386"

Rebooted and running again.. after a day and a half of messing around.

allsteel:

Thanks a lot! That worked fine. I saw that initrd tools had gotten updated again, but I didn't know about the other command. Back up in my regular kernel. I am glad I have 2 backup kernels in my grub boot list though.

Barbara