Recovering a broken linux boot
 

My linux won't boot anymore, not even in safe mode, since I messed with the wireless ethernet settings. Boot hangs on an sbin/modprobe abnormal exit. Is there a way I can undo what I did by editing some boot-up file?

I'm running Mandriva 2008.1 on an Acer 5002WLMI with a Broadcom 4318 wireless chip. I've never gotten this wireless to work under Mandriva. It gave error messages on boot-up. Earlier this week, I used the Mandriva Linux Control Center to try the Windows Broadcom driver with ndiswrapper, and since then I can't boot anymore.

I can still boot from a variety of live linux CD's, so I'm thinking I should be able to comment out the offending line in some setup file, but I'm not sure where to look. Can someone give me a tip?

You should be able to use the installation Cd as a recovery-disk
and undo your latest changes booting of it.

I'd like to avoid re-downloading all the updates if I can. Isn't there something more focused I can do rather than just reinstall?

Who said anything about a re-install? I said (in slightly different words)
"Boot in rescue mode of the CD and undo the latest change".

Realistically it should be enough if you just removed the offending module
while booted from CD.


Cheers,
Tink

try this
 

at boot (if you use grub) hit 'A' and type 'single', you will be dropped in as root. research ways to disable a module at boot...

here is what i came up with:
http://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/add-rem...ernel-modules/

OK, hitting A at grub has no effect on my system. I don't think the Mandriva 2008.1 CD has a rescue mode, or I don't know how to activate it. But the Mandriva 2008.1 CD does boot to a live linux complete with KDE and mounted drives, so I would be able to edit the offending file if I knew where to look.

modprobe.conf says alias eth1 bcm43xx, but that doesn't sound like the ndiswrapper change that got me into trouble.

Everything else in /etc is either too old to be the culprit or doesn't seem to include anything about networking.

If you tried to install any other windows driver in the ndiswrapper you need to remove the bcm43xx driver.