Could do with some help - Wheezy, Kernel updated, now cannot boot
List, good evening,
Been adding some security upgrades on a Wheezy server, these included
upgrading the kernel to the latest - I cannot be precise but I think
it changed from --u5 to --u7. It's pae 386. 3.65, I think, but
that's from memory. I can't check any of this because I cannot boot
the system from the sda or sdb.
The main use of the server is email (inbound, outbound, and IMAP mail
store). I have a backup of the mailstore up to the last hour.
System was Lenny, then upgraded to Squeeze and then to Wheezy; it's
not a clean Wheezy install. System uses LILO to boot. sda and sdb
are RAID1. The boot error message is:
"LILO 23.2 Loading LinuxEBDA is big; kernel setup stack overwrites
LILO second stage"
and then the boot hangs.
During the kernel update, I saw remarks such as looking for, and
finding, vmlinuz, kernel, and things like that, and it found them on
sda and on sdb.
I have a 7.7.0 i386 install DVD. I have a USB CD ROM. Setting the
BIOS to boot from that, I can start the rescue mode but it gets no
further than trying to use its 'CDROM'. The rescue mode won't see the
USB DVD device, it only seems to be happy with an IDE CDROM, which I
don't have (nor any CDs).
I can get to an 'ash' shell, instead of proceeding further with the
rescue installer, but I don't know what to do - neither in the sense
of what has gone wrong with booting anyway, nor how to use the shell
to begin to solve the problem.
I could do with a little help here, to get the system running, and to
fix the booting.
I won't receive list posts - because the email server is down - but I
will be able to check the web archive of this list which, I think, is
updated only periodically, so it might seem as though I am not
responding to posts very enthusiastically but I will be here, for sure!
Grateful for any help, at all,
regards, Ron
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