OK. I made a very bad newbie mess by trying to remove a kernel version the wrong way.

Running Fedora Core 4.

I had used KYUM to update from kernel 2.6.11 to 2.6.12 and after 2.6.14 had been showing for some time I went ahead with it.

Then I found out that ALSA wouldn't run with the nVidia sound/video card. I tried to get the nVidia updates from livna with KYUM but it kept complaining of a dependency that it couldn't find.

So...I thought (not very well in the end) that I would just revert to the 2.6.12 kernel.

I told KYUM to uninstall the 2.6.14 kernel. Never thought till the system locked up that I should have rebooted first and told GRUB to start with the 2.6.12 kernel.

Now the system will obviously not get past starting the kernel as it gets a panic with trying to term init error.

There are some files I would like to preserve and have an older box I can boot up to transfer them to but Knoppix 3.9 doesn't seem to be able to see all the files on the disk. Only shows a folder with GRUB, LOST+FOUND, configs and vmlinuz type files.

Please raise this newbie level and educate me on how to:

1) Get to the rest of the files on the disk using Knoppix so I can preserve them before a total wipe.

and/or

2) Clean up the mess and get the system back up with as much as possible in tact.

Thanks

Roger.

Seems that you can only see /boot partition.

What vmlinuz files do you have? They are kernel images, vmlinuz-2.6.12 or something like that should be your 2.6.12 kernel. The grub configuration should be there around too (in my case it is /boot/grub/menu.lst). Open it in a text editor and look if you understand it. It should be pretty easy to correct, either by changing the order of the boot options or by playing 'default' and 'timeout' options. And please make a backup!

You may also try to mount the rest of your hd. You have to find out which device the hd has (probably /dev/hda, it should be mentioned in the grub config and you may use 'mount'). Thereafter can you figure out the partitions by fdisk, and mount them.

Best,
Ott

Things may not be as hopeless as you think......

Boot from the FC4 installation media into rescue mode, when the menu screen is displayed type; linux rescue

Answer a few questions and follow the on screen instructions. When ready locate the kernel rpm files on the CD and install the kernel .i586. rpm file;

rpm -ivh kernel-2.6.11-1.1369_FC4.i586.rpm --force

Then reboot the system and choose this kernel from the grub to boot to.
Now you can add a newer kernel if you want, since you had problems with the 2.6.14-XX kernel supplied by Fedora install the latest FC4 2.6.12 kernel available on the Internet;

wget ftp://carroll.aset.psu.edu/pub/.mirr...0_FC4.i686.rpm

You can download the file (it is a link afterall) or use the command as listed which is one long line with a space after the wget portion and before the rest (the link).

Then install it as root from where the downloaded file is;

rpm -ivh kernel*.rpm

Booted from FC4 disk 1
Typed "linux rescue"

Answered some basic questions including start network

The system attempted to find the linux and mounted it as /mnt/sysimage and said that I could it the root environment by typeing chroot /mnt/sysimage

After OK it gave me a command line prompt of sh-3.00#

I can cd /mnt/sysimage and see all my old folders and am in the process of FTP'ing the files I wanted to backup.

Back at newbie mode I couldn't find my way to ls the contents of the CD and am not sure exactly how I should rpm the kernel if I did to make sure it goes to the right places.

The rpm command provided will install the kernel and files in the correct location. It should also update the /etc/grub/grub.conf file so you can boot from the kernel. Since you have a working network (and hopefully access to the Internet) the wget command should download the kernel and then use the rpm -ivh command to install it.

Afterall kyum is a GUI interface to yum which is a tool which calls rpm to install/update packages.

Please review 'man rpm' to learn more about rpm and see;
http://www.redhat.com/docs/books/max-rpm/ for even more.

For example, since you might have Internet access (not 100% sure), rpm can download and install the kernel rpm package;

rpm -ivh ftp://carroll.aset.psu.edu/pub/.mirr...0_FC4.i686.rpm

Which is what yum does for you (for the most part) when installing a new package.

Yes it has internet access by starting the network interface during the start of rescue mode.

OOPS.

carroll.aset.psu.edu/pub/.mirrors/3 doesn't exist.

If I look in carroll.aset.psu.edu/pub/.mirrors/1/fedora.redhat.com/updates/testing/4/i386/ all the kernels are newer than kernel-2.6.12-1.1450_FC4.i686.rpm

Yea, older kernels have a tendency to disappear..... the rpm was available when I posted, but is now gone.

Depending on your system configuration you might have a 2.6.12 kernel still, check in your /var/cache/yum directory location.

I've got the files I want copied to another system so I am not totally adverse to a wipe out now. It is just the configuration work that would be saved by recovering. However, if I wipe and start over I could re-document all the options/addons I use to get a system the way I want it.

The yum cache had been cleaned out so no joy there.

What exactly will happen if I "Upgrade" from the original FC4 CD set?

Will it leave most files alone and re-install at that level or will it have a problem with newer files and configs leaving things just as bad or worse?

Not 100% sure but you should be OK, the upgrade installation should not attempt to downgrade any package. The only thing might be the kernel installation. You may have to boot in rescue mode (no chroot) a copy the kernel from the CD to someplace on the hard drive. Then force the install of the older kernel;

rpm -ivh kernel*.rpm --force

You should (hopefully0 )now if you need the i586 or i686 (smp or not) kernel rpm package. If your database still has at least one kernel listed you can find this out by;

$ rpm -qa --queryformat '%{NAME}-%{VERSION}-%{RELEASE}.%{ARCH}.rpm\n' 'kernel*'

For the archives.

Trying to re-install from the original CDs didn't work either.

So I just started over again.

Something new this time is that I can't get Nagios to start and whenever I change permissions in Konqueror I get an uninformative error but it completes successfully. Unless I am doing multiple/recursive changes and then it only does one item. But, that is another thread after I have done some more looking and playing.

Thanks.