Today's update seemed to kill my machine, funeral to follow later (Fedora10)

cquisenb · #1 5th February 2009, 07:20 PM

Today I had a message pop up in the right corner of my screen indicating my machine needed a critical update. I installed all updates. After this, it required a reboot. I rebooted my machine, & it came up with the "grub" prompt. I ran the attempted a rescue via the "rescue" option from the Fedora10 DVD. It indicated that I had no Linux partitions. I was able to list the directories from the born shell. I was surprised to find that as an example, my home directory was gone. So, as I say, I guess I will conduct the funeral later for all that might want to attend. You may send any donations to the "Friends of the lost Fedora" group.

Lately I have been favorably impressed with Fedora's updates. The old problem with dependencies failing seems to have gone away. Then today, it blows up &, as a friend would say, "It was horribly mangled." I'm just curious if anyone else had this happen, or was it just my bad luck.

kr4ey · #2 5th February 2009, 07:34 PM

I had this happen too. So your not the only one. I will try rescue mode in a little while. But looks a a format and reinstall may be in store later (if there is no fix).

cquisenb · #3 5th February 2009, 07:42 PM

I too am planning on performing a lobotomy on my machine, i.e. a reinstall.

Curtis

tw56 · #4 5th February 2009, 07:48 PM

I just had a notification about needing an update. I installed all needed updates and didn't need to reboot. I rebooted anyway and
had no problem. I am just wondering whether you had something installed that I don't that required a reboot? It lloks like about 52 updates for my old laptop.

cquisenb · #5 5th February 2009, 08:01 PM

After I installed the required security updates, it did prompt via an orange triangle shaped icon in the upper right corner that it required a reboot. After the reboot, it went horribly wrong, & I had to pull the life support....

Curtis

woelfman10 · #6 5th February 2009, 08:07 PM

Will stable destroy my data?

It could. Don't trust it. The traditional phrasing is that stable "eats babies."

Jake · #7 5th February 2009, 08:13 PM

Guys, the message "GRUB" when it just stands there does not mean that your machine is dead. All it means is the bootloader made a boo-boo.

Simple solution would be to go get http://www.supergrubdisk.org/ and fix the MBR. And no worries people. You will not loose any Data.

***Hlingler*** · #8 5th February 2009, 08:20 PM

I would be most curious to know exactly what packages were updated. Although I've lost the X11/GUI once or twice, in all my experiences with Fedora, I've never had a complete meltdown after an update, even one involving my personal builds of software - which are fairly numerous and involve important stuff like the video drivers. Not even failed upgrades have prevented booting into at least one kernel. Power failures have three times left one of my three machines hosed, but recovery was effected each time. Another important question would be: what repos were involved?? Your particular software environment and hardware might also be factors, so without knowing all of those parameters, it's very difficult to speculate as to the root cause....

V

Jake · #9 5th February 2009, 10:06 PM

Hmm, I think it happens when the update try's to update grub after installing a kernel, and because it failed, it may have caused grub to break. As the message generally means something has modified grub, and broken it. It's happened to me now about 10 times. and 9 times out of 10 my rawhide grub is broken when I try to use it. However that is just a secondary grub used if I needed to use the drive to boot as I use my main grub which is separate and update it manually. So it's not needed.

Also, the HDD's are left intact, most people get confused and think the drive partition is gone because Fedora puts it in an LVM, and generally LVM's don't mount unless you search and set it up ready for mounting. (IE you find out the vol group etc numbers. )