Re: Urgent! Yaboot died, how to rescue?
On Saturday, July 10, 2004, at 10:07 am, Sean Schertell wrote:
Please help! I've gotta get some work done quickly but I seem to have
killed my yaboot and can't boot. It's on a PowerBook, so no floppy. I got
hit with the bug in module-init-tools 3.1-pre2-1 which causes this
craziness:
modprobe: FATAL: Could not open '/lib/modules/something...
modprobe: FATAL: Could not open '/lib/modules/something...
modprobe: FATAL: Could not open '/lib/modules/something...
modprobe: FATAL: Could not open '/lib/modules/something...
modprobe: FATAL: Could not open '/lib/modules/something...
modprobe: FATAL: Could not open '/lib/modules/something...
modprobe: FATAL: Could not open '/lib/modules/something...
modprobe: FATAL: Could not open '/lib/modules/something...
(times about a hundred or so)
This happened when I tried to install 2.6.6 so for the past few weeks I've
been typing "old" at the boot prompt and using an old 2.4 kernel. So now
I installed the 2.7 kernel which has the same problem and to make things
worse, typing old now causes the 2.6.6 kernel to boot and panic.
How can I rescue my machine so I can get in and edit yaboot?
Have you got a CD you can boot from and execute a shell? If you have, then you can mount the root file system on your hard drive in /mnt on the CD shell's ramdisk, and then inspect your root filesystem to figure out the location and proper name of your old, old, stable kernel (2.4).
mount /dev/hda3 /mnt
You need to establish exactly what your 2.4 kernel is called because it no longer has a symbolic link pointing to it. Having mounted your root filesystem in /mnt, have a look in /mnt/boot and you should find your 2.4 kernel is still there. Make a note of its exact name, (mine's called 'vmlinux-2.4.18-newpmac'). Reboot again from the CD, but this time interrupt the boot process at yaboot (by holding down 'C' until you see a load of 'C's crawling across the screen) and issue the following command at the 'boot:' prompt ...
boot: hd:3,/boot/vmlinux-2.4.18-newpmac root=/dev/hda3 defaults
This command assumes your root filesystem is on partition 3 of your internal hard drive and obviously you should use your 2.4 kernel's exact name in place of mine.
If you haven't got such a CD you can download the one I use from here. It's actually a net-installer boot CD. Just choose 'Execute a shell' from the menu to perform the first phase.
http://penguinppc.org/~eb/files/boot-new-powermac-xfs.iso
Obviously, you need OSX to burn it to disk (I used Toast) but once you've done that you should be able to carry out the procedure I've described above
Good luck,
sebyte
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"You go yours and I'll go mine, the many, many ways we wend.
Many ways, and many days, ending in one end."
Room To Roam by George MacDonald c. 1875
Put to music by The Waterboys in their 1990 album of the same name.
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