About getting the boot logs
 

Hi, all,

Ok, after spending a whole day on this, need to get some help.

I had a dual boot xp/FC2 and upgraded to FC4 a couple of days ago. For my own stupidity I accidently erased xp and spent 2 days to reinstall it plus grub.

So now grub works fine and I can boot to xp and 2.6.11-1.1369-FC4smp and 2.6.11-1.1369-FC4. The problem is with FC4 part:

1. After finally get to the log-in window,
1) keyboard not responding (though mouse responds)
2) cant get my network working (i can see that from the machine name: under FC2 I can see machine_name.domain since I work in a network and get my ip using DHCP; now I can only see localhost.local domain)
3) I can't use kb to type "I" during boot process to see interactively, though I do see some errors both boot and reboot;
4) in "log-in" window I can click "restart" but it hangs untill I move mouse a little, then it will reboot.

2. Now if I use a linux rescue (I have FC3 CD, I upgrade to FC4 using hard drive upgrade), then kb, network are both fine.


Now my questions are: How can I check the log message during the boot process? (I checked /var/log/*, it seems not to have the messages I observed and seems nothing wrong there)

Or what command I should use to get this info?

By the way, my machine is a standard Dell Precision 450 machine. Intel Xeon 2.8Ghz, 2G RAM, 2 LSI Logic 136G SCSI hard drive (one OS each). USB mouse, USB KB.

Thanks a lot.

You are probably looking for /var/log/dmesg. From the terminal with root privileges, run:

dmesg

Regarding an easy way to view logs, the log viewer (system-logviewer) was left out of FC4, because it is being rewritten (gee.., why not leave the kernel out, too?), but you can install the one from FC3 and it will work fine. For i386, system-logviewer-0.9.11-1.noarch.rpm can be found here:

http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pu...s/Fedora/RPMS/

Thanks a lot, WHN. I will take a look again when I get to the office.

Do you mean I can install rpm for logviewer (I really need one after reading these logs for so long) in linux rescue mode?

Oops! That would be hard to do from rescue mode, but dmesg should work, if you can mount the installation.


But is it really worthwhile trying to fix a broken installation or should you just stop and do a fresh install of FC4?


If by “upgrade” you mean using the upgrade option to install FC4 on top of FC2, as opposed to doing a clean installation, then you may have so much stuff messed up, that it would save you time to do a clean FC4 installation.

I tried to upgrade several FC3 installations to FC4 by using the installation CDs or by using yum after installing FC4 fedora-release, just to see what would happen. In every case, something wouldn’t work correctly or something was missing. Actually, in every case, there were lots of “somethings”.

Could they be made to work? Yes, I could get every one to run more or less correctly.

Did I save any time doing the upgrades? Absolutely not, even if you exclude the time spent fixing the problems. In the end, I dumped all of the upgrades and did clean FC4 installations.

It’s probably not that different from doing windows upgrades, but linux is so much easier to configure after an installation than windows is, that it’s just not as painful to do a fresh install of linux as it is to do one for windows.

You just have to weigh how much time you’re willing to spend cleaning up the upgrade mess against the time you are going to spend doing a clean install. At least you know in advance that the second option should work out OK.

I see your point...

That I did an upgrade (as you have rightfully guessed) to FC4 on top of FC2 is because I don't want to mess up with my old data there. And I had the impression that upgrade will do so while a clean installation basically will wipe out all my previous data. If I need to do a clean installation each time, I have to transfer data from my backup each time... hmmm, maybe I can reinstall (instead of upgrade) without losing my data, let me read some more...

Thanks a lot WHN.