Reboot issues with newly installed RHEL 10

[saraswathi55]

Hello,
I just got a dell workstation. It came with RHEL 10 installed on it and it was working fine. Yesterday I just rebooted it and now while rebooting it shows a white bar a the bottom and the words ' RHEL enterprise workstation 10' and the rest of the screen is black above. I did this several times and get the same thing. I put the installation disk and said upgrade to the same version and it went through some tests and it came up again with the same thing. I just got everything installed !! now do I have to redo everything ? whey does it not boot ? the only program I just installed was CISCO VPN anyconnect and this program went on reinstalling every time and the university asked me to reboot. When I rebooted it is coming up with this black screen. I called RHEL and they said I need to go through DELL. At DELL there is hardly anyone familiar with linux issues. They give us the run around. ANy help to reboot or set this up will be greatly appreciated. It is also making me nervous of losing my work in future if I need to reinstall everything and not get back my work.

Saras

[jayd512]

Hello and Welcome!

Just for clarification, could that be SLED 10 installed?
I'm only asking because there is no RHEL 10. The newest version is 6.2.
If in doubt, run the following commands in a terminal:

uname -a
cat /etc/*release

Post back, let us know.

[saraswathi55]

Hello Jay
Thanks for your quick reply. I had my system admin look at it and he has suggested that we just have to do a reinstall. This is RHEL 6.0. I was at home and was wondering if it was 10 or 6 and went with the higher version. What do you say ? Is there any way of rebooting this without installing all over..? I dont know what SLED is.. but I did not install anything other than the RHEL installation which came with the new DELL I purchased last month. All I did was to install matlab and then I ran the VPNsetup.sh available under Iowa state university software when it refused to boot after installing that.

Saras

[jayd512]

Since you have a sysadmin to handle it, I'm gonna recommend that you follow his advice on the best steps.
There probably are ways to save your data, but I'm not overly familiar with RHEL.
Before re-installing, though, you could try to boot into single-user mode and troubleshoot the issue from there. I'd try looking at system logs for a hint.


BTW, SLED = SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop

[saraswathi55]

Thanks Jay.. I did get someone to come and look at it. People here (Nationwide Childrens' hospital, Columbus) mostly work with Mac and Windows. Basically I will be the system admin for this machine. I will try what you have said. I was just talking to the people over at Iowa State and they said there were a lot of issues with RHEL and VPN software and it is very difficult to make it work. I guess somehow the CISCO VPN messed up my OS and I have to reinstall everything. I am glad I do have backups..but others may not be this lucky. My system also has RAID and 24 CPU and is a 64 bit computer and I think it is not advisable at all for anyone to try to install VPN on such a machine ( I thought I will report this in this forum in case someone else has the same problem). Thanks for you help and I do hope I can contact the forum if I need more help.

saras

[jayd512]

...and they said there were a lot of issues with RHEL and VPN software and it is very difficult to make it work.

Blunt answer... Tell them they are wrong. Period.
I'm not the RH expert on the boards, but I found this. Maybe that will help get you going until someone else can chime in.
CISCO and Red Hat work quite well together.

[Roxoff]

Blunt answer... Tell them they are wrong. Period.
I'm not the RH expert on the boards, but I found this. Maybe that will help get you going until someone else can chime in.
CISCO and Red Hat work quite well together.

Just to chip in a bit more, that article talks about CentOS - which is a free rebuild of RedHat Enterprise. RHEL is purchased, and comes with a support contract. But the underlying system is Open Source, CentOS rebuild the binary packages replacing the artwork, copyrighted and trademark bits. It's binary compatible.

[saraswathi55]

Hello Jay and Roxoff..

I guess I have to be careful of what I say. I apologize. I did hear my university people say that they had difficulty making linux systems work with VPN. I am not sure if they specifically mentioned RHEL. The bottom line for me is that I lost my installation and had to reinstall RHEL 6 after running the vpnsetup.sh file that I downloaded. It may or may not be due to the .sh file, but I guess we will never know. I have reinstalled the RHEL 6 now and am sitting here at 8 pm Friday Night reinstalling all my software again hoping to catch up on my work and recopy 200 GB of data that I transferred over just last week, drop by drop through ssh !!

By the way,
I had issues with connecting my Imac also using Cisco VPN any connect. This software was provided by NCH (my office) and did not work when I tried to install it and connect through VPN on my IMAC. It went on reinstalling the software and got stuck (\when it was on the java step on the small screen that comes up). This went on and on for quite a while. I tried it many times. . But I had a previous installation on the Imac ( provided by Iowa State) which finally worked (which I guess was cisco VPN, an older version).

Saras

Saras

[jayd512]

Your last post mentions alot of problems, and they all have one common factor...
It seems that your software might need direct support from the vendor.

[MikeTbob]

For future reference....you can fix a broken install, usually without having to format/install/restore backups. I'm not trying to get you to confused, but if you can boot from any LiveCD or USB, you can perform what's called "Chrooting". Basically what happens is:
1. Your system fails to boot
2. Boot the system with any LiveCD or USB drive with any distro on it
3. Mount the "broken drive"
4. Chroot into the system, fix it (assuming you know how to fix it)
5. Reboot. Hopefully everything went well and the system will now boot
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Grub2#ChRoot

EDIT: Yes, the link is for Ubuntu but the principle is still the same and still applies to most distros.