Today's Update Prevents F11 Boot

[westand]

It seems today's kernel update has given a few people some difficulty -- but my symptoms seem pretty unique. Hope someone can help:

* I go through GRUB normally. I 'esc' out of plymouth, and watch my services start. I get message 'mdadm: No arrays found in config file'. Don't remember seeing this before, don't have any RAID devices.

* Next, my file-system gets re-mounted in read-write mode (don't know if this is normal or not). Then, my services begin to start-up. My last service is 'crond'. All services start normally. When it gets to 'crond' the [OK] status is never reported. Visually, the screen flickers a few times, stops, then nothing happens. I can type characters though, and they do show up.

* If I then shutdown my computer by pressing the power button, the shutdown procedure begins. 'crond' shuts down succesfully (indicating it started just fine), and the computer goes down normally.

* I don't believe this is an NVIDIA issue. I rescue-moded and changed my XORG.conf to the basic VESA driver to eliminate this possibility.

* Worst of all -- No older kernels work now either. They behave in the same way. When I try to boot to other run-levels, no luck either. This tempts me to think the problem might be file-system related and the re-generation of grub.conf threw something off??

Any and all help is appreciated. Thank you!

[marko]

Try booting but at the grub menu, hit the e key to edit the default kernel stanza, pick the kernel line and append a '1' to the end of the line and press the Enter key and then 'b' to boot. This will make it boot but just to single user mode. Hopefully going to single user will avoid the bad service so you can do the next steps. In that mode, log in as root and go to /etc/rc5.d and run

ls -l S*

this will list the start up scripts in the order they try to run, see what number the file is of the service that's numerically after crond, that's likely the problem service.

[westand]

Okay, did that. Only one service is after "crond" and that is "local".

Also, from single-user mode I tried to "startx" and after some textual output, I was met with a black screen. I was unable to ctl+alt+backspace to see the output (hoping it could help me troubleshoot). When I restarted, I tried to direct the output to a file "startx > log" and this didn't work either. Seems like X would be a leading candidate for my issues, then? What can I do besides xorg-conf-ing my driver as "vesa"?

Thanks for your help

[Kasper-pA-]

It's the nvidia package, if you change the nvidia driver to nouveau in the xorg.conf file you will be able to boot into your X... there are a few threads about it... we are waiting for a fix

[fpmurphy]

If you are using a nVidia driver, then every time the kernal is updated, the nVidia driver has to be updated.

Because the nVidia kernel module is built specifically for each kernel release, you need to download and install a new nVidia kernel module each time your kernel is updated. If you suddenly are confronted with a non-responsive blank screen after a reboot, this is probably what has happened. The easiest fix in this case is to log in to one of the virtual consoles, downgrade the system to runlevel 2, remove the old kmod-nvidia-* package, and install the new kmod-nvidia-* package followed by a reboot.

Alternatively you can let your system always automatically download and install the latest nVidia kernel module whenever a new kernel is downloaded by simply installing the kmod-nvidia meta-package instead of the kernel specific package.

[westand]

Yes, I think Kasper-PA hit the nail on the head here (Closed).

I'm aware of the kmod-nvidia new-kernel/dependency thing. I've screwed that up plenty of times in the past too -- but not this go around.

Thanks, everyone.