[6925] in testers
Re: prevert.mit.edu: failed Linux 9.4 update
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (andrew m. boardman)
Thu Apr 28 21:18:26 2005
Date: Thu, 28 Apr 2005 21:18:14 -0400
Message-Id: <200504290118.j3T1IEOg006467@pothole.mit.edu>
From: "andrew m. boardman" <amb@MIT.EDU>
To: testers@MIT.EDU
In-reply-to: <200504272130.j3RLUeti008042@central.mit.edu> (message from Alex
T Prengel on Wed, 27 Apr 2005 17:30:40 -0400)
>I tried updating prevert.mit.edu from 9.3.something to 9.4- the update
>seemed to run normally to the point where it says "update complete,
>please reboot". When I did that, I got error messages about various
>inodes being recovered, then: [everything broke]
I still don't completely understand what happened, but I believe the root
problem was that it was using LILO as a boot loader. Visible problems
were:
1) LILO was configured with both the 9.3 and 9.4 kernels, defaulting to
9.3, which lost badly for obvious reasons. (/etc/lilo.conf, however,
listed only the 9.4 kernel; update.log shows what looks like lilo
failing due to /dev/hda missing.)
2) The X configuration was pointing at /dev/mouse; udev provides only
/dev/mouse0 as a pointer device.
3) The X server exits but irreprably wedges the console when it doesn't
have a valid pointer device.
The machine is now running with grub; I've got more testing to do but
force-switching LILO users to grub at the 9.4 update looks likely right now.
