[SOLVED] Boot Failure after Latest Kernel Update (Fed. 12)

[LazarusLong]

Dual Boot: Fedora 12 and XP Dell 505

I've had trouble with the latest kernel update.

I updated a bunch of packages recently (including Xorg and kernel), and noticed a severe flickering after the update on my center monitor (Samsung T260 - the laptop display did not exhibit the flickering behavior). I backed out all the changes and started updating package by package. After I updated the kernel (again) I rebooted and here's where the fun part is -
I no longer get anything, except the cursor. No grub menu, no grub prompt. I rebooted and ran the rescue disk and followed the procedure to try and point grub at the right boot partition - see here. However (obviously or I wouldn't be posting) that failed to work. I still get a blinking cursor and dead system on boot up.

[devils casper]

GRUB Menu should appear at startup even if you have upgraded kernel or any other package?
Was GRUB Menu appearing before installing Update? GRUB is hidden by default in Fedora. Press any key at startup and check if it appears.

[Tom Varghese]

Use slax liveCD or liveUSB and your HDD will be mounted. Go to your fedora linux filesystem and goto /boot/grub/grub.conf or /boot/grub/boot.lst
You just read it and you can track the problem. If you need any help, please post the results.

[LazarusLong]

GRUB Menu should appear at startup even if you have upgraded kernel or any other package?
Was GRUB Menu appearing before installing Update? GRUB is hidden by default in Fedora. Press any key at startup and check if it appears.

What I meant by Grub menu (inaccurately) was the usual 'starting X in 5... 4...'.

Following your advice, I pressed 'enter' (nothing happened) then 'space' and the menu appeared. I selected the latest Kernel (2.6.32) and it did start booting, but then it gave me a message that SELinux had to reset all its policies and that this operation would take a long time. Before letting that go through, I rebooted, to make sure that only 'space' brought up the grub menu and this time, pressing any key will not bring up the menu. As a result, I can't print the exact message that I got from SELinux.

[devils casper]

Space and Escape keys work in most machines. You shouldn't reboot machine.

Try space or esc key. Select latest kernel and and let machine take its time. It has to enforce Selinux policies for new kernel. In case it doesn't work, we will disable Selinux using LiveCD.

[LazarusLong]

This time, after pressing 'esc' it booted into the latest kernel automatically (i.e. didn't display the grub menu this time around).

The message specifically is: 'Warning -- SELinux targeted policy relabel is required'.

I'm letting it chug through this time. I've never seen this happen with a kernel update before. What triggers this activity?

[LazarusLong]

So it's finally booting again, but the screen flicker is back and File Manager (and anything else that has to do with Nautilus apparently) is still not responding.

I'm going to give CentOS 5.4 a chance. I've had enough of unravelling Fed. 12's problems on this machine.

[devils casper]

If you have ATI or Nvidia Graphics Card, you have to re-install Graphics Driver again.
Proprietary must be re-installed after every kernel upgrade. Fedora is not an exception. One has to re-install Graphics Driver in every distro.

[LazarusLong]

I don't. I never had to install any proprietary graphics drivers either.

I've been running Fedora since 9 and haven't had problems until I upgraded to 12 (reinstalled really). I skipped 11 due to the reports of multiple problems.

[DT0X]

What mode was SELinux in before the upgrade?

What happens if you just let it run through the relabel a la:

#
As the Linux root user, run the reboot command to restart the system. During the next boot, file systems are labeled. The label process labels all files with an SELinux context:

*** Warning -- SELinux targeted policy relabel is required.
*** Relabeling could take a very long time, depending on file
*** system size and speed of hard drives.
****

Each * character on the bottom line represents 1000 files that have been labeled. In the above example, four * characters represent 4000 files have been labeled. The time it takes to label all files depends upon the number of files on the system, and the speed of the hard disk drives. On modern systems, this process can take as little as 10 minutes.

Did it complete the relabel or are you just killing it and re-booting again?

Are you back to the original graphics issue now?