Re: upgrade->dead system, help.
Last friday I had the same exact problem. I'll tell you if I guess a solution.
Cesar
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wil <wsa3@xs4all.nl> wrote:
Hi,
Sorry I have very little info on this...no logs or anything:(
Running SID, with a custom 2.4.22 kernel, ext3 file system.
HD was checked with the diagnostic utility from IBM, including
surface (advanced) check and was fine.
Did an update via dselect yesterday and after that the whole
system has died. When i boot the process stops at
INIT: version 2.85 booting
followed by a blinking cursor.
When i ran the upgrade the thing striking me as very odd was
under "new packages to install" 'kernel-headers 2.5.x.x.' were
mentioned.
Not sure of the exact version anymore but it was 2.5 for sure.
I think it was 2.5.99.
I was kinda flabbergasted by that and saw no reason why those
kernel headers should be installed...since i'm on 2.4.
So i went back into the dselect selection 'mode' and set that
kernel package to 'purge' so it wouldn't install.
This gave me a load of 'xxxx depends on kernel-headers 2.5.x.x. ' like
from gcc and so on.
Struck me as utterly weird aswell cause my system never had anything
2.5.xxx kerlnel related stuff on it...anyways...thinking 'dpkg knows best' i
let
it have it's way and the package in question was installed.
After getting the packages during install/configure something went wrong
aswell but silly me didn't pay too much attention since this happens
quite a lot with unstable and always gets resolved quickly...and
never ended in something like i'm having now.
Can't imagine the cause to be those kernel headers even if it's weird
they were installed, but one of the 20 orso packages which got
updated.
An older 2.4.18 kernel does go thru the entire boot process but
with may many errors mostly in the line of 'can't find /var/xxxxxxxxxx'
After that i tried toms floppy linux to boot the system.
mount /dev/hda9 results in just getting the'special device
not found message'.
And hda9 happens to be /var. fdisk shows hda9 as there and
as ext3 but i think the complete filesystem went out da door on
that partition.
e2fsck gives me a 'the superbloack could not be read or does not....'
etc..etc..etc.
Any ideas on how to get out of this one?...and why this happened?
Cheers
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