FC3T2 Kernel Startup

[Andrew Farris]

On Sat, 2004-10-09 at 16:02 -0400, John Hawkins wrote:
> I have FC3T2 installed on a PIII 450 mhz system. The initial
> installation installed kernel 2.6.7-1.478 and I upgraded the kernel with
> up2date to kernel 2.6.8-1.520 last night. The boot process is not how
> expect it to behave and the new kernel is not being loaded. I've
> rebooted a number of times and have tried to write everything down on
> paper so that I could document this issue. I haven't caught everything,
> so if I am missing something that you think is important, let me know
> and I'll keep booting until I get it all. Here's what I see.

You should upgrade again, the 520 kernel has been replaced several
times, I'm not sure why you would have upgraded to that one since
up2date should have pulled in the newer kernel (the latest kernel is
2.6.8-1.603).  If you want to stay up with development then I suggest
using yum instead, my current yum config is shown in this forum post and
is a good start.  You may want to change the mirrrors later.

http://www.fedoraforum.org/forum/showpost.php?p=108110&postcount=6

You can use similar configuration for yum repositories with up2date if
you wish.. look into the file /etc/sysconfig/rhn/sources to see how to
use some of these yum entries for up2date.

> A quick flash that looks like Grub Stage 2 (not certain as it really
> flashes too quick to read it well).
> 
> Root (hd0,0)
> Filesystem type is ext2fs, partition type 0x83
> kernel /vmlinux - 2.6.7-1.478 ro root= /dev/VolGroup00/LogVol00 rhgb
> quiet
> [Linux -bz Image, setup=0x1400, size=0x148891]
> initrd /initrd-2.6.7-1.478.img
> [Linux-initrd @ 0x17f3a000,0xa5eba bytes]
> 
> Uncompressing Linux..... OK, booting the kernel
> audit (1097336390.4294966319:0) initialized
> Red Hat Nash version 3.5.24 starting
> reading all physical volumes. This may take a while.....
> Found Volume group "VolGroup00" using media at the lvm2 (it think this
> is what this line says - I can't read my scribling well)
> I then get a full screen of what appears to be some type of hex dump
> like:
> 
> 88 36 03 05 00 40 ed (and so on for at least 40 lines)
> 
> After a few seconds the screen clears and the following is displayed:
> 
> Fedora Core Release 2.90 (FC3 Test1)
> Linux 2.6.7-1.478 on an i686
> 
> localhost login: 
> 
> after a couple of seconds the screen clears and I get the Fedora Core
> Graphical login screen.
> 
> 
> Any ideas why the updated version of the kernel is not loading?

You should update grub to latest in development (grub-0.95-3), the
previous version had a bug that would select the default kernel in the
list when you pushed a key to 'see' the menu at boot time.  The menu is
not shown, so when you are booting you probably let the timer run out
and the default was selected.  You can try the new kernel once by
pushing a letter key (such as 'a) when the timer is running.. this will
show you the menu.

New kernels are not booted by default, it is booting the older kernel
because that is what grub SHOULD do for safety reasons when upgrading.
Change the config at /boot/grub/grub.conf to set the kernel you want as
default (it is zero indexed in the list, 0 is the first entry).