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Old 06-25-2006, 12:37 PM   #1
sparxva
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Registered: Aug 2005
Location: Arlington VA
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FC5/Kernel 2.6.17 troubles


I'm not exactly a noob (~19 years of *nix experience now) but I haven't worked with FC5 very much and a few things have changed, especially the update mechanics.

I just installed Fedora Core 5 and the 2.6.15 kernel for x86-64 (2.6.15-1.2054_FC5) and everything seemed fine. In the install process I deleted all pre-existing partitions and then used the installer to set up new partitions. Then I used pup to update the installed packages and it installed the 2.6.17 kernel (2.6.17-1.2139_FC5). However, when I rebooted and selected the 2.6.17 kernel in grub it failed with the error message "Error 16: Inconsistent filesystem structure"

I don't have any problem using grub to run the 2.6.15 kernel (I'm using it now) but it won't load the 2.6.17 kernel. I also experimented with a 2.6.16 kernel I found, but had the same problem. After trying a few things (fsck on each of the partitions, etc.) I decided to use the M$ recovery method (nuke & repave) in case I had done something wrong during the install, but the same problem recurred. The grub configuration looks alright to me.

# grub.conf generated by anaconda
#
# Note that you do not have to rerun grub after making changes to this file
# NOTICE: You have a /boot partition. This means that
# all kernel and initrd paths are relative to /boot/, eg.
# root (hd0,0)
# kernel /vmlinuz-version ro root=/dev/hda4
# initrd /initrd-version.img
#boot=/dev/hda
default=0
timeout=5
splashimage=(hd0,0)/grub/splash.xpm.gz
hiddenmenu
title Fedora Core (2.6.17-1.2139_FC5)
root (hd0,0)
kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.17-1.2139_FC5 ro root=LABEL=/ rhgb quiet
initrd /initrd-2.6.17-1.2139_FC5.img
title Fedora Core 5 (2.6.15-1.2054_FC5)
root (hd0,0)
kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.15-1.2054_FC5 ro root=LABEL=/ rhgb quiet
initrd /initrd-2.6.15-1.2054_FC5.img
title Windows
rootnoverify (hd0,1)
chainloader +1

Another possibility is that I've got a bad copy for the kernel updates (three times). However, evaluating the img files with fsck isn't so easy. I copied the initrd-2.6.17-1.2139_FC5.img and initrd-2.6.15-1.2054_FC5.img files to another directory so I could attempt to mount & fsck them. I know Fedora's img files are gzipped, so I uncompressed them with zcat. But I don't know how to make fsck evaluate unmounted filesystems and I can't get mount to mount them.

I'm sure there's an easy solution, but it likely involves specific to Fedora .img files.

# mount -o loop initrd-2.6.17-1.2139_FC5.img /mnt/iso
mount: you must specify the filesystem type
# mount -o loop -t ext2 initrd-2.6.17-1.2139_FC5.img /mnt/iso
mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/loop0,
missing codepage or other error
In some cases useful info is found in syslog - try
dmesg | tail or so

# mount -o loop -t ext3 initrd-2.6.17-1.2139_FC5.img /mnt/iso
mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/loop0,
missing codepage or other error
In some cases useful info is found in syslog - try
dmesg | tail or so
 
Old 06-25-2006, 01:34 PM   #2
w3bd3vil
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Registered: Jun 2006
Location: Hyderabad, India
Distribution: Fedora
Posts: 1,191

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why dont you download the latest kernel rpm and just do
rpm --ivh --aid kernel.rpm --force
and then set the grub default to it.
That should be easy...
 
Old 06-26-2006, 07:28 AM   #3
sparxva
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Registered: Aug 2005
Location: Arlington VA
Posts: 11

Original Poster
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Quote:
Originally Posted by w3bd3vil
why dont you download the latest kernel rpm and just do
rpm --ivh --aid kernel.rpm --force
and then set the grub default to it.
That should be easy...
That is more or less what I eventually did. I uninstalled the 2.6.17 package, manually downloaded the package again, and installed it using rpm. Unfortunately, that means that there likely an unidentified bug in pup or a problem with the files I downloaded from the unknown server pup used.

My system works now, but the problem is likely to recur for someone else at a later time. I wish I could have pressed a little further on diagnosing the problem.
 
Old 06-28-2006, 07:38 PM   #4
sparxva
LQ Newbie
 
Registered: Aug 2005
Location: Arlington VA
Posts: 11

Original Poster
Rep: Reputation: 0
Quote:
Originally Posted by sparxva
That is more or less what I eventually did. I uninstalled the 2.6.17 package, manually downloaded the package again, and installed it using rpm. Unfortunately, that means that there likely an unidentified bug in pup or a problem with the files I downloaded from the unknown server pup used.
Just to be sure, I went back and recreated the problem again using the Fedora Add/Remove software console application. It reproduced the problem exactly. Other than setting up ethereal to sniff packets and hunt for the web site with the (potentially) bad kernel copies, is there an easy way to tell where it fetched the kernel package?

It would help with troubleshooting if I can narrow the issue to a specific site. I could also do an apples-to-apples comparison of packages to determine whether the problem is the package installation program or the package.
 
  


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