System crash after installing updates
 

Just trying to recover my F7 installation after a tragedy yesterday. Was downloading regular updates as usual and on installation received a 'send error report' message. On rebooting was welcomed with an
"INIT id "x" respawning too fast: disabled for 5 minutes" message

From here I rebooted with rescueCD and edited the /etc/inittab to change default run-level to 3 which seems to have worked, I can get a shell-prompt but cannot get "startx" to run.

If I use Knoppix 5.1.1 I can mount SDA1 and 2 but not SDA3 (where my f7 installation is)

Any advice welcomed!

Tom

""INIT id "x" respawning too fast: disabled for 5 minutes" message"

"can get a shell-prompt but cannot get "startx" to run."

These are typical error inducations when your GUI won't work.

"Was downloading regular updates as usual"

See if you can back out any updates that were applied to Gnome, KDE, or X. The problem likely was caused by a bad update or only partial update to some component of your GUI.

--------------------
Steve Stites

Hello,
I had that happen twice on different distributions..What happened in my case was the kernel was modified or updated and it caused my Nvidia driver to not work on the new kernel..Fortunately I had left the NVidia driver in my home directory so in my case it was simple to cd to there and re-install the driver..That may or may not be what happened to you but in any case you have to go into xorg config and re-set things to get your GUI back..
good luck,
jolphil:twocents:

Does anyone know if it's possible to uninstall a kernel update (with Yum or whatever?)

Tom

check what kernels you have installed with
rpm -qa | grep kernel

if you have more then one you can remove the last one installed with
rpm -e "past the kernel to remove here from the rpm-qa command"

if not, get out you could install the one from the installation dvd. you will need the matching nvidia driver to run any kernel. you could edit xorg config file to boot to the driver in the kernel, nv or nvidia.

I had both Fedora Core 6 & Fedora 7. I learned very quickly that it was necessary to only do updates once a week, usually Saturday night. But just before doing updates, if I was satisfied with it's performance I would backup the entire system. When these sort of events would pop up I would erase the entire installation and load the image of it before the updates and work out the problem. Turned out to be the best way to update Fedora. Details can be found in this thread, if you're interested in protecting yourself from the effects of bleeding edge Linux distribution's updates.