Hey all, I have been playing with Slackware for years and I am still a complete noob. Anyway, I loaded Slackware 14.2 stable on my laptop and ran

slackpkg update
slackpkg install-new
slackpkg upgrade-all (This updated my kernel)

After rebooting my laptop the keyboard and usb mouse doesn't work. I'm assuming that the 4.4.38 kernel or modules didn't get installed correctly or by using a USB boot drive that i am trying to boot into the old kernel. I have no idea what im doing with the kernel / modules. Im also guessing that if i remade the USB boot drive after upgading the kernel then everything would work. Problem is i do not know how to do that. Any ideas?

Thanks for the help.

Hooks

Your "guess" about the USB boot drive sounds like the correct approach. When changing the kernel the boot loader needs to be addressed (lilo,grub).

Do you know how to do that on a USB boot drive?

I don't use USB for /boot or any of the operating system files, nor do I boot the system from a USB connected drive, nor do I have any experience with modern motherboards (elilo, grub, etc).

Others that have experience with these items can probably more efficiently make suggestions. I was just pointing you in a general direction.

If you use lilo to boot you can often get by with an automated kernel upgrade by using slackpkg or installpkg and simply re-running lilo and perhaps remaking initrd. But many (most?) Slackware users prefer to blacklist kernel packages in slackpkg and perform the kernel upgrade manually. This has the added advantage of being able to keep the previous kernel available when the new kernel doesn't work, as in your case.

Thanks for the info. Im sure that i can update the kernel and modules manually. Whats confusing to me is the whole USB boot drive. I am under the impression that someone booting from a USB boot drive doesn't even need lilo or grub. Is this correct?

The bootloader (hard drive, flash drive, whatever) needs to know where the kernel/initrd is located, either by file name or block device coordinates. My understanding is that if you change the kernel location you need to tell the bootloader.

Great, Thanks for the help. Now i just need to figure out how to do that. Thanks again.

So could i just update my kernel and modules and run the /var/log/setup/setup.80.make-bootdisk script to recreate boot disk?

Anyone have any ideas on how i can fix this?

Quick thought would be to boot off an installation media, then ensure your HD is plugged in. Mount everything as it would be in normal Slackware, but do it under the /mnt/ folder (so the root partition would be mounted to /mnt/, the /boot/ partition, if you have one, would be mounted under /mnt/boot/, and etc for any other folders).

Then, you want to bind mount the proc, dev, and sys.

Finally, run chroot /mnt to make the system think that /mnt is the root folder.

At this point, you basically have a full Slackware CLI running. Now, just view your /boot/ and see how it's laid out, then check your /etc/lilo.conf to ensure your kernels are pointing the correct location. Once that is done, just run lilo to write the new config to drive, then try rebooting.

But, I've never used a usb boot drive, so this is just speculation on what might need to be done.

OK, Here is what i done to fix my issue.

I replaced the vmlinuz kernel on my usb stick with the 4.4.38 kernel that i had downloaded.

I then ran

slackpkg update
slackpkg install-new
slackpkg upgrade-all (This updated my kernel)

which updated my kernel on my /boot to 4.4.38.

I rebooted and everything is working perfectly. Luckily for me my son is very good at linux.

Thanks everyone