Total System Failure

[Vikeyev]

When I first came to this site I didn't realize I would be posting this often, sorry about that guys. But somehow I have managed to stuff up everything so badly I have to reformat and re-install opensuse. I would very much like to know what I did that could have possibly caused this so i will give you some information about what i was doing in the hopes that this will never happen to me again.

Well I was just trying to get used to everything and I noticed something in the task bar that said you have updates that failed to install (or something along those lines). So I opted to install them manually with YAST2 and during the installation some of the files were failing to download, I was unsure what to do with these files (their was a ton of them, I had to actually sit at my pc for over an hour because I couldn't let it go through on it's own due to all the failing downloads and installs) and so I just decided to skip them, everything seemed to be going along normally. Then my computer froze, so I restarted and tried to boot into opensuse and it kept freezing, (I even went to my brothers house to play the xbox with him for a while) and no matter how long I waited for it wouldn't boot into opensuse. I tried the failsafe mode and it just kept coming up with an error (I probably should have written the error down, I wasn't really thinking about that at the time) and after about half a dozen tries, decided to reformat everything all over again.

So with these failing downloads in YAST2, what am I supposed to do with them?
If I retry they just keep failing, so the only other options are abort and skip, am I supposed to skip them or is that what caused this to happen in the first place?

Thank you in advance for any help.

PS: Google Chrome (I'm not on my good pc atm it's installing now, that's why I use this hideous browser) claims this site is potentially dangerous, it actually blocked it to start off with, don't ask me why.

[Segfault]

Partial upgrades do no good, you have to troubleshoot why downloads fail. Are you using an outdated version of Suse?

[Vikeyev]

Partial upgrades do no good, you have to troubleshoot why downloads fail. Are you using an outdated version of Suse?

I'm using Opensuse 11.2, I'm back on my good pc now, obviously it's finished installing, but It says I have some updates to apply but I'm to scared to apply them. What do I do?

Could they be failing because I don't have Opensuse 11.3? How do i troubleshoot the errors I'm getting when downloading/installing these updates, do I need to download some kind of debugging tool like on windows?

[gogalthorp]

No, 11.2 is still supported so updates should be fine.

Please post exact error messages.

[Vikeyev]

No, 11.2 is still supported so updates should be fine.

Please post exact error messages.

I reformatted awhile ago but as for the error messages, I can't remember exactly what they were but every time I get them now I just keep retrying and if it doesn't succeed after awhile I just abort. I couldn't install updates for ages because the first part just kept failing every time I retried. But I saw a similar thread on another forum where some guy suggested putting in a bunch of commands (I wish I could remember what they were) but every single command gave me an error and failed, funnily enough the updates worked perfectly after that. I have no idea what seems to have fixed the problem but I am not about to complain now. Thanks for the help.

[gogalthorp]

If you install your Video driver manually you must reinstall it after a kernel update. If you install from the repo's then the driver will get updated with the kernel.

I suspect that may have been partially what your above problem was.