2009/7/25 Geoffrey Cowling <[email protected]>: > 2. I made a new directory and mounted the / partition on it. > (Accessing /etc meant that I could read fstab). > > 3. I mounted the other partitions to the directories under / (I > realise now that vmlinuz was probably broken linked on / becaause > /boot was not mounted. Derr! > > 4. I chrooted into the new / > > 5. It seemed to be possible to fix a kernel without destroying > everything else. This was my BIG question ... I was even tempted to > use the chroot as a sort of virtual machine. But was a little > cautious about repeating disaster. In the meantime I had to press on > with my tasks using an underpowered and less memory/hard disk machine > (though using Ubuntu 8.10) I had no problems with complex convert > scripts, with no memory or hard disk problems. So this does not seem > to have caused my original failure. > > 6. There was a suggestion about using apt-get "reinstall kernel", but > htis seems to be a wish rather than an option. Right? But doing an
aptitude has a "reinstall" option, and besides is more powerful. It also has full command line interface like apt-get so no down side for switching to it. > apt-get update/upgrade got me a new ? security upgrade, which was > great. Installing the current kernel did not seem to work, but perhaps > it did occur, but grub problem stopped booting) > > 7. I tried update-grub next. This said it could not find the root, > corrupted fstab? trying hda1. Which was no use! That possibly happened because the chroot'ed environment didn't have access to /dev, /sys and /proc, what you need to do AFTER mounting the root partition and BEFORE the chroot is: # for i in sys proc dev; do mount -o bind /$i /root/$i; done (assuming your going-to-be-chrooted root partition is mounted under /root) I'm not sure this is the reason but it's a good thing to do when dealing with kernel installation inside chroot in any case - mkinitrd needs this for instance if you install new kernel modules. (rest deleted). In all your post I couldn't find the string "fsck" - have you tried to force-check the suspected partitions? Cheers, --Amos -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
