Upgraded using fedup and now can't get past the load screen

[Socky]

Hello,

I upgraded from Fedora 17 to 18 using the fedup package, or at least attempted to. There were no errors in the terminal when I ran the command, then rebooted and selected the "System Upgrade" option from grub as the wiki says.

This screen (mine said 18, not 13!) came up and after completing it waited like that for about a couple of hours, finally I'd had enough so I just reset my machine (probably a bad move).

Now there's an option on grub to load "Fedora 18", with "System Upgrade" and the regular items below it. But when I try to load Fedora 18 booting up stops at this screen (but black rather than blue). From here I can press Pause/Break, Insert, Delete or Home and get to a full screen terminal that says "Welcome to Spherical Cow", or similar, but I can't actually do anything from that window.


When trying to boot into any previous version (Fedora 17 with previous kernals) from grub (only keeps 2 previous versions), it will hang just before the log in screen comes up. From here I can't enter any terminal windows with Alt + F2, etc. So again can't do anything I've seen recommended via the terminal. This is what is displayed on my screen:


I've never had problems with preupgrade before, so assumed fedup would work in a similar way. Is there anything you can recommend to get this working again, or would a complete reinstall be best?

Thanks.

[chrismurphy]

Originally Posted by Socky

I've never had problems with preupgrade before, so assumed fedup would work in a similar way. Is there anything you can recommend to get this working again, or would a complete reinstall be best?

I haven't done any fedup testing. But the screen shots are almost zero help. All the information about where it's getting stuck will be boot messages, so you need to hit the Esc key after GRUB, and shortly after the the kernel and initramfs are loaded (it's when you get one of those two plymouth screens, your first two screen shots). That should display boot messages and give some indication where the problem is.

Another way to do this is edit the GRUB entry, by hitting the 'e' key, finding the linux line, and removing 'rhgb quiet' at the end of that line, then F10 to boot the edited config and see where it fails. You might have to take an actual photograph and post that.

It looks like you're getting as far as X though, so this may be a video driver problem. So it just depends on what you want to do: giving up and installing from scratch is invariably faster than fixing the current one, but if you figure out what the problem is it might be worth a bug report so someone else doesn't get tripped up by this with final release. You are testing Fedora 18 after all.

[fpmurphy]

Press the ESC key to see the console messages instead of the Plymouth Splash screen. when booting. These messages will help you diagnose that is going on. I am not in front of the particular system I installed F18 on a couple of days ago but I know that I hit the exact same scenario and had to reinstall one package to solve the problem. I figured out which package from the console messages.

[Socky]

Originally Posted by chrismurphy

Another way to do this is edit the GRUB entry, by hitting the 'e' key, finding the linux line, and removing 'rhgb quiet' at the end of that line, then F10 to boot the edited config and see where it fails. You might have to take an actual photograph and post that.

That's the error message. It gets stuck on this screen (pressing ESC to get between the two):


After googling for solutions a couple of problems/fixes seem to be:

• Username <4 chars long (mine is), this is on Fubuntu but possibly a similar bug. Not sure how to change my user name though, as I can't log in.
• Similar to this bug except that bug happens while running as usual, so probably not this.
• This bug caused it a while back according to this thread but it seems to be fixed now.

Here's a pastebin of the file at /var/log/boot.log.

Not sure where to go from here as I can't access a terminal. By finding/fixing it not only do I learn more but as you said a bug report can be submitted and fixed for other users.

[chrismurphy]

Edit the grub entry with 'e', fine the linux line, go to the end of that line and replace 'rhgb quiet' with 'single' - no quotes. See if you can boot in rescue target. If so I'm curious to see the result from:

rpm -q selinux-policy

If you have 3.11.1-67 or later then I'd try doing:

restorecon -Rv /

Then reboot, again use esc to back out of the graphical boot, or reedit the grub.cfg to remove rhgb quiet.

[Socky]

It's 3.11.1-66.f18.

Here's my Xorg.log. Booting into previous kernels loads X (once I got to a point where I could F<number> into terminals but can't get back to that stage again). Still wouldn't solve the issue, though.

dmesg from 3.6.7-4.fc17 and 3.6.10-4.fc18 kernels. Again not sure what to look for...

edit: By going into rescue target on the latest kernel and then exiting it I can get to the stage where X loads, and can then press F2-5 to get into terminals which are working fully and can connect to a network, but still no login screen

[chrismurphy]

Originally Posted by Socky

edit: By going into rescue target on the latest kernel and then exiting it I can get to the stage where X loads, and can then press F2-5 to get into terminals which are working fully and can connect to a network, but still no login screen

It's sounding like this is video card related. You might so some searches for your video card model to see if there are problems with it and nouveau. Did you previously have an nvidia proprietary driver installer before the upgrade? What happen if you boot with kernel parameter nomodeset? That is, replace 'rhgb quiet' with nomodeset. This may prevent X from starting but you'll be at least in multi-user.target to do some more debugging.