today's kernel update munged my system

[dep]

today there was, as usual, the little danger sign that says there are packages that ought to be updated and, as usual, i updated them. they included a new kernel image and modules, etc., which was fine. but during the installation of the kernel there popped up a box saying that the grub version of lilo.conf (yes, i know it's not called lilo.conf with grub) had changed, and did i want to keep the old one or some new one. the default was to keep the old one. i presume that this came up because yes, i recently used one of the applications designed for that purpose to remove 318 of the previous 319 kernel updates from the boot menu. in that the default was to keep the old one, that's what i chose. whereupon the machine began to freeze with a kernal panic -- not syncing: attempted to kill init!

so. how do i get out of this? booted a system rescue disk that seems to offer nothing useful except, maybe, mc, but i do not know what to do to what to restore bootability.

so. with a bootable CD and mc, what do i need to change to boot the machine again?

an observation, also: the application that offers the choice of keeping the old file might better call it "render machine unusable." also, if previous kernels will not boot following the installation of a new one, what's the point in their remaining in the boot menu or, for that matter, on the machine at all?

this kind of thing should not happen, and it especially should not happen when only defaults are chosen.

anyway, thanks in advance for a recipe out of this.

[dep]

a bit of an update, and new question

okay, i've managed to get 2.6.24-22 to boot; 2.6.24-23, though, blows up early on. previous one, though, didn't, and i think it was 2.6.24-23 also. (would be nice if this stuff were logged; if it is, i do not know where.)

so new question: how can i revert to the kernel that got replaced today or, absent that, how can i force a new download of today's kernel, in case there's some corruption issue? (i've d/led the same kernel to two other machines uneventfully.)

thanks.

[chadikins]

Re: today's kernel update munged my system

I have the same problem with the killed init kernel panic. I have had problems with normal kernel updates every time I have done them (through normal updates). I don't know why, my install has worked great other than that. Ran fsck and fixed all kinds of stuff, it was after that the kernel panic started.

I'll post if I can figure anything out. Otherwise, I hope someone wiser comes along.


Good luck

[flarson]

Re: today's kernel update munged my system

Almost certainly the 2.6.24-22 is the one you were using until this upgrade. To reinstall 2.6.24-23 you need to know the package name which is probably
linux-image-2.6.24-23-generic or something like that. dpkg -l | grep linux-image will tell you. Then run

sudo aptitude reinstall linux-image-2.6.24-23-generic

or whatever the name is.