On 16/09/2008, John Summerfield <debian(a)herakles.homelinux.org> wrote:
atm I cannot boot the system in question.
At some point, having had the system running for a week or two and
applied lotsa updates, I discovered the kernel I booted was no longer
installed. (Evil, Debian does not do that).
Quick workaround, reboot.
I discovered that, contrary to my belief about how many kernels I should
have, there was in fact only one (this system was originally installed
about f8alpha or beta), and I had a period where there was a succession
of dud kernels so I configured yum to preserve lots (and then rpm
--erased --justdb for good measure).
Way out suggestion: you didn't have a separately mounted /boot that
has somehow become unmounted, and the new kernel written into the
/boot on the root partition?
Having one kernel would not be a serious problem but for the fact it
does not get past the initrd, as far as I can see. There's a message
about creating /dev nodes (or some such) and the system proceeds no
further. Booting with "init=/bin/bash" does not get any further.
Possibly very broken initrd missing some modules you need? Anyway, the
OP's advice about reinstalling the known working kernel from rescue
mode seems good.
System hardware: HP DC7700 Intel vPro E6300 CPU etc etc.
I'm not in a position to give much info on this atm as it doesn't boot.