3.11.1 kernel upgrade fails: any way to use former kernel?

Matthew Miller mattdm at fedoraproject.org
Tue Oct 1 19:08:08 UTC 2013


On Tue, Oct 01, 2013 at 01:56:01PM -0400, Sean Darcy wrote:
> Using Fedora-x86_64-19-20130627-sda (ami-10cce555) on us-west-1b, I
> updated to the recent kernel. Now it won't boot. It seems initrd is
> fried. Anyway to get in to make it to boot from a previous kernel?

So, here's what to do in ten actually-pretty-easy steps:

 1. Stop (but do not terminate) the broken instance,
 2. Launch a new temporary instance in the same zone. (Or use an existing
    one that's working.)
 3. Detach the root volume from the broken instance
 4. Attach it to the working instance as /dev/sdf (or whatever)
 5. In the working instance, mount the filesystem
 6. Find and fix the problem (possibly edit the /boot/grub/menu.lst?)
 7. Unmount the filesystem
 8. Detach from the working instance
 9. Reattach to the hopefully-fixed original instance
 10. Boot


As step four and a half, you may actually want to run fsck on the volume.

In general, you should store your data on a separate volume so that if this
happens you just replace the machine and go on without worrying about it.


-- 
Matthew Miller  ☁☁☁  Fedora Cloud Architect  ☁☁☁  <mattdm at fedoraproject.org>


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