Cannot boot after Fedora 10 -> 11 upgrade
 

Hello. I have just run "preupgrade" in F10 to upgrade to F11. It took several hours, and now that it's done I can't boot it at all - it hangs with an error "trying to unpack rootfs image as initramfs."

I have two physical hard drives as follows:
sda : sda1 for Windows, sda2 Fedora boot, sda3 Fedora
sdb : sdb1, sdb2 both for Fedora
sda3 sdb1 sdb2 > LVM

So that in /etc/fstab, the first two lines look like this

/dev/VolGroup/LogVol00 / ext3 defaults 1 1
UUID=b6d32194-1180-4ec8-878e-a20e28d7233c /boot ext3 defaults 1 2

Now I have to use the following GRUB commands

root (hd0,1)
kernel (hd0,1)/vmlinuz-2.6.30.5-43.fc11.i586 ro root=/dev/VolGroup00/LogVol00
initrd (hd0,1)/initrd-2.6.30.5-43.fc11.i586.img

I assume initrd needs rebuilt, but how? I can't run mkinird unless the system is booted. I tried using the F11 LiveCD and chrooting to the system OS but this did not work (it wanted to use the 2.6.29.x kernel from the CD instead). Furthermore, when I had F10 working, I did not need to prepend the kernel/initrd entris with (hd0,1). (By the way, after the upgrade my whole grub.conf and menu.lst files were wiped out.) Any help would be appreciated. Thanks.

This, I think, is beyond repair. Somehow my Windows partition got totally hosed. Whatever the upgrade process was doing to sda1, an NTFS partition, is beyond me. Windows doesn't boot either--using the XP recovery tool I see my Windows drive letter is now E (should be C) and this is now divided in three parts, E, an unlettered "partition", and J which is labeled "Fault Tol..." (whatever that means). Thank goodness this was a simple Windows install that I only used with my scanner for scanning negatives.

When I get the time, I will reinstall everything from scratch. I would discourage anyone from using "preupgrade" who has a windows partition.