Major upgrade failure

[Alan Cox]

> I managed to get into F16 recovery mode and tried to run grub2-install, 
> but it failed, saying that it couldn't stat /dev/root.  I ran telinit 3, 
> which worked and logged in as root.  Alas, I still can't run 
> grub2-install, but on reboot it says that I'm using Grub 1.99, so I 
> guess that's OK.
> 
> Normally, I could at least ssh in from my laptop, but it's not accepting 
> connections so I can't even do that.  I now have two crippled computers, 
> one that can't boot into the newest kernel and one that can't properly 
> boot except into CLI mode.  People, I really, really need some help!

/dev/root should be a symlink to your root device so if you have the
typical broken Fedora detaults you'll have something like

/dev/mapper/vg_pointless-lv_root		/

and your /dev/root would be a symlink to /dev/dm-0

(the device mapper device for the first logical volume)

One of the other reasons I detest the Fedora obsession with lvm and
initrds is this kind of thing - all this extra crap makes recovery hard
and fragile.


Anyway I would try putting in a /dev/dm-0 link by hand (or appropriate
one for your root fs). See if that is enough to get it to work out what
is going on.

The other thing if the link seems to exist or is behaving oddly might be
to setenforce 0 first in case the partial selinux labelling broke it ?

Alan