On 10/08/2015 12:37 AM, Brad Rogers wrote:
Thanks. Well I do not have GRUB here but LILO, and there are no saved old kernels as long as I know.There should be; Debian doesn't delete old kernels as part of the upgrade process. Even LILO should have an option to boot older kernels. Older kernels are deliberately kept such that, if the new kernel *does* fail, you can still, hopefully, use a previous one. It's been a long time since I used LILO, so can't advise how to access those old kernels.
In fact, (and in my case) LILO does delete old kernels during the upgrade, however I always had two opportunities for booting the system (one kernel of 486 category a.k.a. "older machines", the other of 686-pae type for "modern machines"). During all kernel upgrades up to now (since squeeze 6.0.1a to wheezy 7.9) both kernels had been replaced by newer versions at the same time, and I was always able to restart the system without issues. This was the first time that both kernel variants failed to boot.
archived in /var/cache/apt/archives as .deb packages. For example,Those are an artefact of the install process; You appear not to be deleting packages once installed successfully. Nothing wrong with that, but you can end up short on disk space that way. This lack of space can lead to booting issues.
Well, there were just few .deb packages of the last known kernels there - so not much space was occupied. And I had luck with them because I used them to reinstall the previous (good) kernel images without downloading them again :-) So it seems that keeping those packages in cache for a while was actually useful. Thanks anyway.