(resent from two days ago; did not get through to the list! Retrying
with a "cap E" in the address)
OK, I've got a hosed system, and would appreciate some suggestions on
how to fix it. System details are: dual PPro, SCSI disks only (except
for a CDROM), tulip-chipset PCI ethernet, a sound card, Matrox
Millennium graphics card, and not much else.
I was (happily, at least after dealing with sendmail->postfix) running
mdk-7.0, but needed the 2.2.16 kernel security updates. afaict these are
not available for a 7.0 system, at least as built RPMs, so I decided to
go to mdk-7.1, for which kernel updates are available.
The Mandrake update from 7.0 to 7.1 failed, perhaps for the same reason
as discussed below. So, I clean installed, which was successful, at
least after selecting the Expert mode (the other modes either did not
clear the disks, so failed due to claimed insufficient space, or they
declined to install a full set of RPMs).
But as of this morning I had a 7.1 system up and running. So, I went
ahead and installed the appropriate 2.2.16-9mdk kernel rpms to complete
the upgrade. And the system will no longer boot :(
The symptoms:
1) after RPM installation, the softlinks in /boot were not consistant
for using the 2.2.16 kernel. Several links pointed at 2.2.15 items.
2) there is no initrd file for 2.2.16
3) mkinitrd declined to create one, saying that it couldn't find a loop
device. It suggested running insmod loop.o, but that file is missing
(see (5) below).
Well, afaik initrd isn't necessary (otherwise, the kernel update would
have provided it, right?). I fixed up the soft links, since there isn't
enough of 2.2.15 to actually work, and then reran lilo and rebooted.
Then
4) unable to boot. I suspect that it is missing the necessary Adaptec
SCSI driver.
5) some 2.2.15-4mdk kernel resources are missing, so I can't go back
afaik. For example, the RPM upgrade removed the contents of
/lib/modules/2.2.15xxx.
I assume that these problems come up for SCSI-only systems, since others
have seen success at upgrading. btw, this is actually the second machine
which has failed to upgrade cleanly here, and both machines have similar
SCSI-only setups (just with different cards, etc).
Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated. TIA
- Tom
ps New information: I was able to recover my 2.2.15-4mdksmp system by
writing a CDROM with the missing files taken from another machine. So
I'm back up and running with 2.2.15-4, but 2.2.16 is still hosed. And
we have since tried to update another machine with the same result:
the Adaptec SCSI driver is not being included in the initrd, so the
kernel can't figure out how to find the root directory/disk as it
boots.
--
Thomas Lockhart
Caltech/JPL
Interferometry Systems and Technology
