On Wed, 2007-10-24 at 01:18 +1000, James Gregory wrote: > I upgraded one of my computers to Ubuntu Gutsy with aptitude recently > (the update-manager -d method refused to work), and am now unable to > boot my computer into the new kernel (thankfully one of the old ones > still works).
I found "do-release-upgrade" to be the next best approach if update-manager fails. If you are having trouble booting a new kernel with a slightly odd I/O system then it is likely to be the initramfs lacking a needed module -- I had this problem on my PowerBook Mac which tossed me into a busybox shell (rescue mode?). I then insmod-ed the ide_core module, continued to boot, and generated a correct initrd. You can boot you working kernel, then display the installed modules using lsmod. You can also examine the contents of the initial RAM disk using gzip -d -c /boot/initrd.img-2.6.22-14-powerpc | cpio -it Running that on the old and new kernel you can probably come up with a clever guess as to what module is missing (and I'd be thinking a module starting with "raid" for your problem, or maybe the driver for your RAID card). Use modinfo to determine the dependencies of the modules you think are missing until you have a full list of the modules you want to insert into the not-yet-booting kernel. Archive the booting /boot files for the booting kernel, just in case. Edit /etc/initramfs-tools/modules to add the missing but required modules for your RAID array. Run update-initramfs -u -k $V, replacing $V with the version of the kernel that isn't booting. Check that the /boot/*.old symbolic links still point to the known good kernel and that the not-old symbolic links point to the new kernel and recently-generated initrd. All symlinks need to be contained with /boot, since that it all that is available during kernel load on most systems. Boot into "Linux". Hopefully it now works. If not, boot into "old" and try again. Plan B would be to boot the new kernel into rescue mode and modprobe modules until you have the I/O system running. Then use lsmod to list those additional modules, add them to /etc/initramfs-tools/modules and generate a new initramfs as above. Regards, Glen -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
