Re: Server fails to boot after upgrade

[Kim Naim Lesmer <knl@bitflop.com>]

On Fri, 18 Jan 2008 22:51:13 +0100
"Thomas Damgaard" <thomasdn@gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi
> 
> I hope you can help me. My situation is this:
> 
> After upgrading some packages (including kernel upgrade, I think) my
> server does not boot.
> 
> The IDE activity LED does not blink a lot after I turn the power on,
> and I cannot hear the disk head moving. So I am figuring that it fails
> just after GRUB or something.
> 
> I do not have any monitor or a keyboard, so I cannot see exactly what
> is happening, but I have taken the primary hard drive out and put it
> in an USB enclosure, so that I can mount the root filesystem of the
> server on my laptop.
> 
> I can then chroot into the filesystem and do stuff. I have tried
> installing an older kernel image package. But this did not help.
> 
> Do you have any suggestions on how I can solve this problem and make
> my server boot again?
> Thanks.
> 
> Additional informaiton:
> My hardware is a VIA mini-itx board with two 250GB ATA drives. The
> primary master contains one large ext3 filesystem which is the root
> filesystem. I boot from this.
> The secondary master contains one large ext3 filesystem that is
> encrypted using LUKS/cryptsetup. I use this for storage.
> 
> My /boot/grub/menu.lst is here:
> http://thomasdamgaard.dk/p/P1050.html
> 
> When it failed booting it used the kernel version 2.6.18-5-486.
> 
> 
> -- 
> Med venlig hilsen/Kind regards
> Thomas Damgaard Nielsen
> http://thomasdamgaard.dk
> 

Hi Thomas.

I don't think you have had a kernel upgrade, because if you had, grub
would have added both kernels to your boot menu because of the option:

# howmany=all

You would have seen both kernel 2.6.18-4-486 and 2.6.18-5-486 in the
boot menu, but you don't.

Since you are able to mount the drive on your laptop try taking a look
in the different logs to see if you can find any useful information.

---
Med venlig hilsen/Best regards

Kim N. Lesmer
Programmer and systemadministrator
Programmør og systemadministrator

Web    : www.bitflop.com
E-mail : knl@bitflop.com