Synaptic kernel upgrade - cannot boot

[jrleighton]

In retrospect I think I have done a foolish thing....please help me out somebody !

Whilst installing some packages using the synaptic package manager, I went for the "mark all" option and installed a new kernel (this was yesterday).

Now I cannot boot my kubuntu box. Kubuntu loads, but the KDE environment doesn't load up, so no desktop. With my previous kubuntu install CD, when I choose the "start kubuntu in safe graphics mode" option, I get the message "invalid or corrupt kernel image".

What do I need to do to recover please ? Presumably in future any kernel upgrades should only be consiered after some thought (you can tell that I've migrated from windows !)

Thanks for any help out there.

[jrleighton]

Re: Synaptic kernel upgrade - cannot boot

Presumably I need to roll back to the previous kernel. If I booted up with something like knoppix, and then deleted the latest kernel directory, would that do the trick ? If someone can help me boot up with the kubuntu live cd to run the "rescue" command, then great. But at the moment, I get "boot loader: could not find the kernel image: 6Tz" Any ideas pls ?

[Fenyx]

Re: Synaptic kernel upgrade - cannot boot

If you didn't edit your /boot/grub/menu.lst after the kernel upgrade, your old, previously working kernel would still be there and you should still be able to access it through GRUB. When a new kernel is installed, it doesn't overwrite the previous kernel and just adds itself to the GRUB, right above the previous kernel. So it should be something like this:

new kernel
new kernel (recovery mode)
old kernel
old kernel (recovery mode)
memtest.

If your GRUB is like that when you boot, you can just choose your older kernel and uninstall the kernel you just installed through the upgrade.

[jrleighton]

Re: Synaptic kernel upgrade - cannot boot

Thanks for the help folks - really appreciated.

Finally, I got to figure out that it's actually an xserver issue.....and (so that others don't have to waste theirs and others time) here's the solution:-

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=187177

It says to use the vesa driver. With my nvidia card, I just used the nv driver I had before, and it still booted up fine with the new kernel.

I'm learning..... Thanks to all who have tried to help me.