Fedora 16 Install Failure - Error 15

[davidcasper]

My Fedora 16 install has failed. I used preupgrade to go from Fedora 14. I did the first part OK, then rebooted and it installed all the packages. At the very end it gave a message to the effect that it failed to write the bootloader and it might not boot. Sure enough when I rebooted, it did not boot.

What happens is it gives the prompt "Upgrade to Fedora 16 (Verne), but when I select it, it goes to a blank screen which says "Error 15: file not found. Press any key to continue".
But nothing after that.

So I then built a Live CD on another machine and can boot the CD. But I am clueless as to how to proceed. I think if I choose install to Hard drive, it will obliterate everything there which I don't want. There is much on those drives I want to preserve.

So where should I go from here?

David

---------- Post added 4th March 2012 at 12:02 AM ---------- Previous post was 3rd March 2012 at 06:25 PM ----------

I am trying to figure out what to do to bring this machine back alive. Using the disk utiklity on the live CD boot, I mounted /dev/sda3 (ext4) which appears to be where /boot was located on the hard drive. It is a 210MB partition. Here is the contents of it. I can't tell what is right or wrong, but I am surprised to see both grub and grub2. I figure grub2 is new, and I don't understand it at all. Should I fix the grub.conf to point at vmlinuz-3.2.7-1.fc16.x86_64 and initrd-plymouth.img? Are these the right files to use. What should the grub.conf file look like for fedora 16. (The only thing on this machine is the Linux - it's not a dual boot or anything like that). I am flailing around in the unknown for me here.

total 24122
-rw-r--r--. 1 root root 111642 Feb 20 20:56 config-3.2.7-1.fc16.x86_64
-rw-r--r--. 1 root root 18421 Feb 20 20:57 config.mk-compat-wireless-3.3-rc1-2-3.2.7-1.fc16.x86_64
drwxr-xr-x. 3 root root 1024 Mar 3 18:36 efi
-rw-r--r--. 1 root root 178436 Dec 7 17:55 elf-memtest86+-4.20
drwxr-xr-x. 2 root root 1024 Mar 3 18:58 grub
drwxr-xr-x. 3 root root 7168 Mar 3 18:58 grub2
-rw-r--r--. 1 root root 16571555 Mar 3 18:58 initramfs-3.2.7-1.fc16.x86_64.img
-rw-r--r--. 1 root root 619935 Mar 3 18:56 initrd-plymouth.img
drwx------. 2 root root 12288 Dec 7 2009 lost+found
-rw-r--r--. 1 root root 176760 Dec 7 17:55 memtest86+-4.20
-rw-------. 1 root root 2375702 Feb 20 20:56 System.map-3.2.7-1.fc16.x86_64
-rwxr-xr-x. 1 root root 4607184 Feb 20 20:56 vmlinuz-3.2.7-1.fc16.x86_64

[jslavin]

I'm glad to find someone else who has been struggling with this problem, though I'm sorry to see that noone has responded with a solution. I just did an upgrade from F14 to F16 and experienced exactly the same issue. One thing I saw somewhere in the official docs, though I can't find it right now, is that the requirements on the size of the /boot partition are larger with grub2 than with grub. So I'm assuming that that is the source of my (and your) problem.

If that's right, it may require re-partitioning the disk to expand the /boot partition. It's possible that this can be done non-destructively using gpartd, though last I checked it couldn't handle LVM volumes. Even if this could be done, it's not clear to me how one would proceed from there.

Perhaps the easiest alternative might be to use the LiveCD to get access to your files, copy them somewhere safe and then do a fresh install.

Anyone with better suggestions?

Jon

[davidcasper]

Thanks for your response. What I fear has happened is that somethow the boot partition has been expanded, and has eaten into my other partitions. The only paritition I can mount on the hard drive from the live CD is the boot parition. The rest (two LVM partitions and an 'extended' partition) do not mount, and dmesg gives that indication that they are all toast. I think that is why the 'rescue' option does not present itself from the live CD, there is nothing there that can be rescued.

This is very disappointing. It seems I have lost everything on my hard drives.

[jslavin]

Hmm, that doesn't seem too likely to me. I think that the installer uses gpartd which could non-destructively repartition (by the way it seems that now gpartd can deal with LVM). But, I didn't think that any changing of partitions would be done during an upgrade. I think that the failure happens during the attempt to copy the bootloader to the /boot partition when it is found that there isn't enough space. But you say you only see the /boot partition. I did burn a LiveCD but haven't had a chance to try it yet. I'll try to do that tonight (I'm at work and my system is at home) and see what I get on my system.

Jon

[davidcasper]

I am unable to mount the partitions on the hard drive from the live parition. This is the klind of information I get from dmesg, although adimitted this was from an Ubuntu CD
[ 369.490378] attempt to access beyond end of device
[ 369.490389] sda4: rw=0, want=4, limit=2
[ 369.490401] EXT3-fs (sda4): error: unable to read superblock
[ 369.515747] attempt to access beyond end of device
[ 369.515758] sda4: rw=0, want=4, limit=2
[ 369.515768] EXT2-fs (sda4): error: unable to read superblock
[ 369.528387] attempt to access beyond end of device
[ 369.528396] sda4: rw=0, want=4, limit=2
[ 369.528404] EXT4-fs (sda4): unable to read superblock
[ 369.548596] FAT-fs (sda4): bogus number of reserved sectors
[ 369.548608] FAT-fs (sda4): Can't find a valid FAT filesystem
[ 369.564287] attempt to access beyond end of device
[ 369.564298] sda4: rw=0, want=66, limit=2
[ 369.564308] isofs_fill_super: bread failed, dev=sda4, iso_blknum=16, block=32
[ 369.568692] SQUASHFS error: Can't find a SQUASHFS superblock on sda4
[ 459.956614] EXT3-fs (sdb): error: can't find ext3 filesystem on dev sdb.
[ 459.976487] EXT2-fs (sdb): error: can't find an ext2 filesystem on dev sdb.
[ 459.988369] EXT4-fs (sdb): VFS: Can't find ext4 filesystem
[ 460.008619] FAT-fs (sdb): invalid media value (0xf3)
[ 460.008626] FAT-fs (sdb): Can't find a valid FAT filesystem
[ 460.045025] ISOFS: Unable to identify CD-ROM format.
[ 460.060340] SQUASHFS error: Can't find a SQUASHFS superblock on sdb

I think my drives are toast. I really regret trying to upgrade my system now.

[randomuser]

Hey guys,

Take a look here:
http://fedoraunity.org/Members/fenri...pgrade_cleanup
and see if it addresses your issues. Davidcasper, take special note of the 'not enough room in /boot' section.

[jslavin]

I checked now by booting from the LiveCD and all my files seem to be there. (By the way, all the fonts and images are missing from the desktop at first and I can only get them by changing my desktop resolution, but that's a separate issue.) I'd like to try to use rescue mode, but I haven't found any way to get into it from the LiveCD. I can edit the boot parameters, but putting "rescue" at the end of the line doesn't seem to do anything. Can anyone tell me how to do this? The Fedora docs (at least the ones I've seen) are not helpful on this.

[fervirtual]

Hi David !

I'm a bit confused here.
Your LiveCD is sending a lot of error messages too.

Can you get a FEDORA CD, boot, and post the result of :

# fdisk -l

[davidcasper]

Thank you, fervirtual, for your interest. However so much time has gone by now (10days) that I have just done a clean install and re-partitioned and re-formatted both hard drives. Very disappointing that I have had to do this. I do not consider fedora to be a stable system. Even with the clean install it was a nightmare to install vsftpd.