Help! Problem with slackware 15 upgrade
 

Hi, I upgraded my Linux partition to slackware 15 today. It was not on 14.2 but on a more recent version of slackware-current, about 1 year old. I have upgraded this way for ages (normally once per year without a problems), but now when I boot it does not manage to mount my /dev/sda1 on / and it does not allow me to mount it manually either. The disk is detected with the correct partition with fdisk.
Now that my /efi has also disappeared, I cannot see the efi boot menu or boot my other OS. Completely stuck!! Any advice would be appreciated.
Thx

Did you run "slackpkg install-new"?

Hi, in UPGRADE.TXT they have the command

upgradepkg --install-new

That is what I used, not slackpkg install-new

Was new packages install?

Yes all looked fine with the installation of the new packages and upgrade of existing, no errors, so when I rebooted and got that problem I was utterly surprised. I could potentially reinstall completely on my / partition from dvd after reformatting (need to use another computer to burn it), but I was hoping to avoid doing that if possible. If I can figure out how mount my /dev/sda1 I can maybe repair it, but I have not managed to mount anything so far.

This computer which you upgraded from a year old instance of Slackware-current to Slackware 15.0, what sort of computer is it? Factory built or custom built? If factory built, then what is the make and the model, and has it been modified? What are the specs which you think would be helpful in this diagnosis?

Are you able to boot this computer from a CD or DVD, or from a flash-drive?

If this is an efi system did you run eliloconfig or copy the new kernel and initrd over to the efi partition before rebooting after upgrading? Your probably going to need a dvd/usb iso to boot from to fix the problem.

Hi, it is a 6 yr old Gygabite 14" computer (P45 I think, label with name faded), factory built but with extra hard drive, with Slackware on SSD and Windows on the hhd. It is an efi system and I suspect the issue came when I run eliloconfig. I will burn a dvd and see if I can use it to boot in safe mode on the existing disk. Not sure how exactly to fix it though without formatting so I will come to post here for help when I get there.

Solved. It was not as terrible as I expected. After starting from DVD, and checking all was fine with the disk and that the EFI partition was OK, I tried various things and then I changed the booting order in my BIOS around (from "Slackware" to my own "mc" as first, where these labels which appear in my efibootmgr).

After running eliloconfig straight after the upgrade, I did not get a choice of what to boot and it started directly on "EFI\Slackware\elilo.efi from SYSTEM", which was not working for some reason, with no chance to load or detect my sda1 which contains my system files (kernel panic if ignored).

The above option is associated with this entry, after running
efibootmgr -v

Boot0003* Slackware HD(2,GPT,89130ae0-da1d-4381-8279-655d8cd34adf,0x96800,0x82000)/File(\EFI\SLACKWARE\ELILO.EFI)


When I set mc as number 1 for booting in my BIOS, all OS are correctly detected and refind allows me to select which one to book (generic, huge, those broker, MS, ....). Now I can select to boot on "boot\vmlinuz-huge-5... from /" and that works like a charm, booting my system onto Slackware 15. this is associated with the efibootmgr option:

Boot0005* mc HD(2,GPT,89130ae0-da1d-4381-8279-655d8cd34adf,0x96800,0x82000)/File(\EFI\BOOT\BOOTX64.EFI)

All is fine now.

I am not sure why the default slackware option did not load the vmlinuz correctly (I can see all soft links to the corresponding huge are correct), but I am content to be able to work again.

Thanks for all the help.

I am glad you found a solution to the problem. Thank you for reporting what you found. :-)

I suspect the kernel and/or initrd in /boot/efi//EFI/SLACKWARE is incorrect. Coping the kernel(not symlink) from /boot to /boot/efi/EFI/SLACKWARE/vmlinuz and the initrd.gz to /boot/efi/EFI/SLACKWARE/initrd.gz will probably fix the problem.