My research has turned up a million of these... but they all have to do with people building kernels... upgrading revisions... adding kernels...
Mine... is on a bare install.

This system has had Fedora 12 running on it since last February and life was great until last Friday. Following advice found on the web, I did a "yum update" which took off updating the world. The problem... I left the house for a couple of hours and when I came back... the console was sitting at the above message.

I won't bore you with every step of the way... but I have made numerous attempts to just blast and re-install Fedora 12 off of the same CD set that I used in February. And each time, the above happens when I boot.

I have gone so far as to start a Windows install, just to have IT rewrite the MBR and then re-run the Fedora 12 installation. Same results.

The installation goes fine. Without a hiccup. It congratulates me and bids me to reboot. I pull the last CD out, reboot, and get the same message.

I found another place that claimed bad memory would cause this. I found Memtest86, built a boot CD and it runs ad nauseum until I care to stop it ... with no errors. I found the "Ultimate Boot CD"... built a boot CD of that and ran everything I could think of on the disk drive. No problems found.

I'm stumped.

To my mind, I am doing a bare metal re-install, of the same thing that I installed in February, and whatever this is... it appears to be able to survive everything I throw at it. "The cockroach has met it's match" in terms of endurance.


I was thinking of going home and trying another hard drive in the machine and seeing what happens. I figure it is THAT or the "paint on the cabinet" and I'm getting ready to order the paint!

If anyone has any ideas, I'd love to hear them. First and foremost... what am I not taking into account that makes this run differently from my original installation in Feb??

Thanks,in advance, for your consideration.

Bob R.

IF the boot area seems funny, and it just won't work...BE CAREFUL AS THIS WILL WIPE THYE FIRST 1M OR 1G PART OF THE DRIVE...BOOT, PARTITION TABLE, WHATEVER...you can try re-init. To do this...remember the warning, and back up your stuff!:That's all I can say. Hope this helps

That last post...the sda is my hard drive...example. IF YOU SO ELECT, use your hard drive instead

Thanks for the response Penguin! One thing about this... there is nothing to back up. I am honestly not trying to save the drive... I am trying to blast it clean to do an clean ... bottom up... installation.

I have never seen /dev/full and /dev/zero. Just by looking I am guessing that they are pseudo devices that serve as data sources. The zero is probably zero but I am a lot less sure of what /dev/full supplies.

From what you wrote it looks like this procedure just blasts the first 1M or 1G with the full pattern and then zero.

Am I on the right track here? After blowing it like that is there a need to fsck the drive to restore sane contents to that area?

Again, thanks for commenting.
Bob

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A quick bit of research shows that /dev/full is a pseudo device that returns ENOSPACE on any write and is a source of NULL on reads. The place I saw it said that was the same as /dev/null.

So it looks like either one of these will "zero out" the first 1M/1G of the disk. Is that more like it?

I must disagree with the above dd command. Instead I would do:

The MBR, which contains the partition table is on the first 512 byte sector, and dd has a default byte size of 512. If you use 1 MB or 1GB you will erase a large amount of data. I may even question PenGUiN_6_1's intent by posting this command.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Master_boot_record

Anyway, this error is generated when either your boot manager is misconfigured, or your kernel does not support a filesystem or HDD and your initrd does not contain these modules. I would try re-installing the boot loader, and make sure to use a good install kernel.

===========
Thanks for responding!
Well, what blows my mind is that I am using the same distribution set that I used in February... I am allowing the installer to set up the partitions as it sees fit... so I can not see where I have much influence on what is happening. That is the part that is bugging me. I am letting it set up the partitions ... I am letting it set up the boot loader... so I can't see a reason that it should fail.

This is nuts!

I didn't get a chance to do anything last night... home duty called...

But thank you again...

Bob

So, basically, you have installed this exact system before and it worked, but now it doesn't, and there doesn't seem to be any hardware issue. Yes, it is puzzling.

What if the DVD is bad, or was scratched ?

I would burn it again or if you have the iso, use 'cmp' to compare the drive to the iso.

You could also try installing another distro that you might have around.

Just an update ( I imagine everyone is getting tired of this!!!)
Following the last tip I got, I used dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda with a count that wound up wiping 22Gb of my hard drive and, yes, that is exactly what I intended to do.

I then tried a fresh install of Fedora 12.
The installations went perfectly. Not one hiccup.
The fact that I did the "disk wipe" DID show up. The installer, when it went looking for hard drives popped up a window that told me that something was wrong with /dev/sda and it needed to be initialized.. and it could DO that... but I was going to lose everything on the disk. Good news: that is exactly what I wanted!!! So I clicked the button to allow it to initialize.

As I said, the rest of the installation went book spec perfect. At the end it wrote grub to the drive.

And then, it told me to re-boot into my newly loaded Fedora.

Guess what?

Same error.

I cannot begin to believe that this is happening. I am really becoming convinced that something is wrong in that box that is not showing up during normal operations.... only during a boot.

As distasteful as it sound... I'm getting ready to slap Windows on it just to see if it will install and boot. I honestly think that I will be totally mystified... whether it will or won't !!!!!!!!

I have never seen a system like this: that you flat can not do a clean, ground-up, installation of an OS without hitting an boot failure.
By the way, it (obviously) boots off of the CD rom drive just fine. It appears to be only the hard drive.

Try anything, just don't try the same thing over and over. Try another distro or Window$ or HDD or something.

Latest try. I found a Fedora 12 distro that I created at work (on the work Mac, on the work network, to install on a work machine).
I tried to install it... it failed the exact same way.
It ran the install flawlessly then told me to reboot!!!!
NO joy in Mudville!

I'm going to try another HDD tonight.

I have had some luck .... but I don't think that I have all the answers!

The machine that I am installing on is a "captured before my wife's company threw it in the dumpster" Dell 2.8Ghz desktop machine.

I went prowling through the bios and found a bios option I have never seen anywhere else: OS INSTALL MODE.

All the research that I have done indicates that it just limits memory to 256Mb for older operating systems. I PERSONALLY believe it does something else... but I don't know what.

On a lark.. I turned this mode on and re-ran my install for the millionth time. But this time was different. The installer would only run in text mode. But I forged onward. What was really weird is that the installer ran from the first disk... and the first disk only... and then said that it was complete and ready to boot.

Filled with doubt, I pulled the CD out and booted....and guess what? It booted! Now, it only booted to command line linux. I don't believe that it really performed a complete installation. But THEN I turned OS INSTALL MODE off.... and ran another install from the Fedora 12 set.

Not only did this installation work....but it booted afterwards.. and booted properly.

I don't know what this OS INSTALL MODE is but I wonder if this "mode" also protects the MBR or critical locations on the disk so that they will be harder to corrupt in normal mode.

Does anyone have any experience on Dells and the installation of Linux regarding the need to switch in to this mode to install the boot sector?

I'd appreciate hearing any stories....

Thanks,
Bob

Interesting. Maybe it blocks access to the MBR also ? It certainly is possible, I have heard of something like this before.