latest updates don't boot

[Chip Old]

On Wed, 26 Jul 2006 16:00 -0400, Chip Old wrote:

> On Fri, 21 Jul 2006 07:16 -0400, tomhorsley at adelphia.net wrote:
>
>> I haven't had time to do much investigation on this yet, but last night 
>> I genned FC5 from the DVD, it came up OK, then I downloaded all the 
>> latest updates which got me to 2.6.17-1.2157 and now the boot never 
>> seems to finish - it just stops printing messages really early 
>> (possibly around the time it normally switches to the graphical boot 
>> which I hadn't yet turned off). The disk doesn't seem to be running 
>> anymore and a reasonable amount of waiting didn't change anything. It 
>> isn't totally frozen - I can still hit return, and the cursor moves 
>> down one line, and Ctrl-Alt-Del reboots it.
>
> Sounds very familiar to me.  I was about to post the following when I 
> saw your message:
>
> I've been a UNIX admin (mostly Solaris) for many years, but am 
> relatively new to Linux and need some pointers from the old hands. We 
> have three 1u servers running FC5 that are used as name servers.  All 
> three machines are identical hardware:
>
> Intel SCB2 Motherboard
> 1200 Chassis
> BIOS 8CB20.86B.0065.P19.0208221005
> Dual Pentium III 1.2 GHz
> 2 GB RAM
> 2 80 GB IDE drives
> Promise FastTrack 100 Controller configured for RAID 1
>
> I recently updated one of the machines from Fedora Core 
> 2.6.16-1.2133_FC5smp to 2.6.17-1.2157_FC5smp.
>
> Quiet mode is disabled in grub.conf.  Under 2.6.16-1.2133_FC5smp, 
> reboots occasionally (maybe 1 time out of 10) hang at "Making 
> device-mapper control node".  It's annoying, but not crippling. 
> However after the update to 2.6.17-1.2157_FC5smp, reboots *always* hang 
> at that point.
>
> For the time being I have reverted to 2.6.16-1.2133_FC5smp, but I don't 
> like the prospect of not being able to update the kernel beyond that 
> version.  Any ideas on what might be causing this and what I can do to 
> get around it will be greatly appreciated.

FWIW, the issue still exists with Fedora Core 2.6.17-1.2174.  On reboot 
the box still hangs at "Making device-mapper control node".

-- 
Chip Old (Francis E. Old)             E-Mail:  fold at bcpl.net
BCPL Network Administrator            Phone:   410-887-6180
BCPL.NET Internet Services Manager    FAX:     410-887-2091
320 York Road
Towson, MD 21204-5179  US