Failure to boot new F15 minimal netinst install

[Ben Boeckel]

Hi,

After upgrading my F15 netbook today, it failed to boot again. It
refused to give me a login prompt and nothing happened after at least 20
minutes after sitting at this[1] screen. In this state, the only way to
get any response was to hard-reset the machine. Ctrl+Alt+{Fn,Delete} did
nothing. Going into init 1 (via grub menu editing) got me a shell, but
trying systemctl default or ^D put it in the same state as before. After
so much of this, it seems as though something on /boot became unhappy
(it was uncleanly unmounted every time) as the keyboard behaved weird
('1' inserted a 't' and everything else seemed to be just spaces) so I
was locked out of init 1 as well. I tried doing a fresh F15 minimal
netinst install and I am at the same state. I'm hesitant to do too much
without some guidance because of the chance that /boot gets corrupted
again and needing another reinstall.

>From what I can recall and hints from Bodhi, (at least) the following
were upgraded on the original install:

  - kernel-PAE-2.6.28.2-8
  - systemd-21
  - udev-167-$unsure

Other things may have also been installed, but I can't recall. The
previous kernel upgrade was 2.6.38.1-$unsure to give a lower bound on
packages that may have changed. I have a list of what was installed
(after an attempted yum history undo from one of the init 1 instances to
fix things, unfortunately partial due to packages being deleted from the
repos), but it's on the netbook yet (saved in /home).

--Ben

[1]http://i.imgur.com/odjeA.jpg