Loading Initial Ramdisk Fail......

[Carfax]

Hello guys,
I updated to kernel 3.3.0-4 on my Fedora 16 yesterday and after restarting my machine, I got the "Loading initial ramdisk" message and then it gets stuck there forever. It just won't boot. I can't tell what could've possibly gone wrong and i was hoping you guys could help out?

[glennzo]

Probably best not to reply if you have nothing useful to add. Can you CTRL/ALT/F2 to a virtual terminal? Had you installed ATI or NVidia drivers prior to updating the kernel?

[Carfax]

Sorry about that sir, I was a little frustrated. To your first question, Yes i can access the virtual terminal and to the second, No. I didn't install any drivers before updating the kernel.

Thanks in Advance for the help

[glennzo]

Yes i can access the virtual terminal and to the second, No. I didn't install any drivers before updating the kernel.

Thanks in Advance for the help

Drat! I was hoping the problem might be caused by graphics drivers. At least the reply pushes the post to the top of the pile again. Hopefully someone will have a suggestion.

[Carfax]

Hopefully. I googled some stuff and suddenly decided to check for my /boot/grub/grub.conf through the virtual terminal and found out that the grub.conf file doesn't exist. Might that be the problem?

[glennzo]

Not unless your system is using legacy grub. Should be using grub2 by default.
Log in and run the following:

rpm -qa | grep grub 

Post the result.

It should be grub2. Therefore you should have a file called grub.cfg in /boot/grub2. Have you searched this forum? There may be threads with similar problems.

[root@phenom16 glenn>$ rpm -qa | grep grub
grub2-1.99-13.fc16.2.x86_64
grubby-8.8-2.fc16.x86_64

[root@phenom16 glenn>$ find /boot/ -name grub.cfg
/boot/grub2/grub.cfg 

[Gareth Jones]

Can you still boot normally by selecting your previous kernel in the GRUB boot menu?

[Carfax]

Can you still boot normally by selecting your previous kernel in the GRUB boot menu?

No Sir, all previous kernels fail as well...

[secipolla]

Did you read http://forums.fedoraforum.org/showthread.php?t=274324 ? It offers some solutions.
I installed the latest nightly-build live Xfce (24/3) and in the first post-install boot I got the same error. Choosing the recovery mode booted and then ctrl-d entered the default mode. I completed the installation, upgraded the system and the next boot worked fine.
So it could have been plymouth (which was upgraded) or some other glitch.

[Gareth Jones]

Yes, try the things in the thread secipolla linked to.

Also, if switching to another virtual terminal works, what does it show? Do you have a text login-prompt?

[Carfax]

Did you read http://forums.fedoraforum.org/showthread.php?t=274324 ? It offers some solutions.
I installed the latest nightly-build live Xfce (24/3) and in the first post-install boot I got the same error. Choosing the recovery mode booted and then ctrl-d entered the default mode. I completed the installation, upgraded the system and the next boot worked fine.
So it could have been plymouth (which was upgraded) or some other glitch.

I already tried everything in that sir. Unfortunately i still don't have recovery mode showing on my grub menu, so i can't try that

Yes, try the things in the thread secipolla linked to.

Also, if switching to another virtual terminal works, what does it show? Do you have a text login-prompt?

Yes, I receive a text-login prompt, i can actually login and use the virtual terminal, but no more than that

[Gareth Jones]

Is there anything suspicious in /var/log/messages or /var/log/boot.log?

[secipolla]

I didn't check yet but I think by just adding single to the end of the "linux" line in grub (edit from grub menu) it should go to recovery mode.

[Carfax]

Is there anything suspicious in /var/log/messages or /var/log/boot.log?

To be quite honest sir, there's a whole bunch of stuff there and i can't really tell whats suspicious or not

I didn't check yet but I think by just adding single to the end of the "linux" line in grub (edit from grub menu) it should go to recovery mode.

Can't edit anything from the grub menu. Anytime i try, it just reloads the grub menu again

[secipolla]

This won't help in this issue. But I'm new to Fedora and I think that it's adopting grub2 only now.
I can go into edit mode but the cursor appears misaligned to its actual place and I couldn't edit what I wanted. Another custom entry I added (for Puppy Linux frugal mode) just made the system reboot without grub giving any errors.
I'm using in-development F17 but I'm thinking that maybe your errors are GRUB's fault. So if you could by means of a live-CD install GRUB legacy maybe it would work.

I noticed that Fedora's grub2 uses some quite different configuration to Debian's, like it has a bunch of settings in its boot line. So while I used grub2 since almost when it came out, I haven't understood yet how Fedora configures it.

P.S. but the difference may come from the LVM setup that I never used before.