F11Preview: Won't boot after yum update

[DougWare]

I wiped my CentOS 5.3 install last night and went to Fedora 11 Preview. The system booted fine, and I started a yum update. The system never booted afterward. It comes up to the blue "loading" bar, makes it to about 20% and then the screen blanks except for a flashing cursor. I did change the system to start at runlevel 3 before the reboot (by changing the inittab file). I can't even seem to attempt to edit the boot options, because it goes straight from the BIOS to loading the kernel.

Any ideas? My first impression is to reinstall, disable the rawhide repo (it seemed to be enabled by default), and don't change the runlevel.

My Server's Information:
Model: SuperServer 6031 (Quad P3 700s)
RAID: 2 Dell PERC2 DI Controllers (5 73G, 10 18G SCSI 160 Drives)
RAM: 3G
NICs: 3 10/100 (usually in a bonded config)

This server is used as a file server at home and a streaming media server for my various UPNP devices in the house.

Moved to F11 Alpha/Beta Discussions...

[leigh123linux]

Originally Posted by DougWare

I wiped my CentOS 5.3 install last night and went to Fedora 11 Preview. The system booted fine, and I started a yum update. The system never booted afterward. It comes up to the blue "loading" bar, makes it to about 20% and then the screen blanks except for a flashing cursor. I did change the system to start at runlevel 3 before the reboot (by changing the inittab file). I can't even seem to attempt to edit the boot options, because it goes straight from the BIOS to loading the kernel.

Any ideas? My first impression is to reinstall, disable the rawhide repo (it seemed to be enabled by default), and don't change the runlevel.

My Server's Information:
Model: SuperServer 6031 (Quad P3 700s)
RAID: 2 Dell PERC2 DI Controllers (5 73G, 10 18G SCSI 160 Drives)
RAM: 3G
NICs: 3 10/100 (usually in a bonded config)

This server is used as a file server at home and a streaming media server for my various UPNP devices in the house.

Fedora 11 Preview is a snapshot of rawhide, you need the rawhide repo enabled for updates.

[hephasteus]

hit esc key when it's loading and you can watch a text screen instead of a blue loading bar.

[stefan1975]

My Server's Information

you really mean to say that you replaced a server running CentOS (thumbs up) ... with a beta release of fedora ... which in full-final-released state is still unpredictable at times? Man you must really love tinkering with your server .... a lot! :-)

does selecting the fallback kernel in the grub boot (hit tab right after the bios loads) menu work?

stefan

[DougWare]

I'm going to try the escape and tab keys when I get home (just over an hour from now). I'm used to hitting the down key give grub some input and halt the automatic boot timeout, esc (but not tab) could be reserved for add on card BIOSes.

I do love to tinker, and as I said this is just a media and file server. I have a 14 DLT tape library that was given to me, so I keep all my stuff backed up and secure!

[DougWare]

It was hanging after attaching SCSI devices (that was the last message).

I've reinstalled Fedora 11, and excluded the kernel packages from the rawhide repo. I'll try again once it goes GA.....

Doug

[hephasteus]

It's always either disk or video that kills the boot. I thought linux networking was bad until I tried to install hackintosh. Network manager works my nforce chip perfectly and apple gets totally messed up with it.

[mcmackin]

Dougware,

You can boot the live CD and mount your / filesystem and edit grub.conf. You need to comment out the hiddenmenu line and increase the timeout to a value greater than 0, maybe 3 or 5. This will allow you to select a kernel at boot and apply options through grub.

You may just need to add some driver options for your SCSI controller to help the kernel deal with the tape library...