Fedora 16 boot fails

[yman1]

Hey, I have a serious problem booting my Fedora 16. Firstly there was a problem with fsck. If I skipped it, I got errors like in the attached image (I'm sorry, I don't know how to get the bootlog in the textual form; /var/etc/boot.log contains an older, successful one).
So I tried to fix the fsck error. "e2fsck -f /dev/dm-1" found some erroneous blocks, I agreed with all the fixes. After that, the fsck error disappeared, all the rest kept unchanged though.
I wanted to get some details so in the shell I ran some of the commands "systemctl ...". All of them caused a segmentation fault. (Similarly poweroff or halt end with the same result.)
I think the problem might be just in the last version (37-17.fc16) of systemd since this application was in the last update I performed. Nevertheless I can't undo it (yum history undo last) - the ethernet connection probably is not ready yet.
Can anyone help me please how to fix the boot?
And - as said above - I'm sorry for providing just an image of the boot log. But if you zoom it to 100%, it can be read. Or please advice how to get the textual form ;-)

Thanks in advance, Petr

[BrianMicek]

Hi yman1,
I've had problems just like your mentioning in January. What is special about your problem is that it looks things are complaining about some kind of device mapper RAID (which is the problem I had).

I don't know if this helps, but I tried to make my systemctl command core dump and I couldn't. I'm not sure if this provides help, but I ran this:

[root@desktop ~]# systemctl --version 
systemd 37
fedora
+PAM +LIBWRAP +AUDIT +SELINUX +SYSVINIT +LIBCRYPTSETUP

I don't recommend doing what I'm about to suggest, but I removed all that systemctrl stuff mostly because at the time I didn't understand it (it was a new addition to Fedora 16 I think). I have a bash script wired in to handle my disks and RAID. I sort of regret it and in hindsight I think the problem was that my RAID could not assemble at boot. Could you check if your RAIDs are assembled at boot time with a command like:

[root@desktop ~]# cat /proc/mdstat

[yman1]

Hi BrianMicek, thanks for the reply!

Originally Posted by BrianMicek

[root@desktop ~]# systemctl --version

prints exactly the same as you sent, followed by "Segmentation fault (core dumped)". But I don't understand what to do (or not to do) with it now...?

[root@desktop ~]# cat /proc/mdstat

prints:

Personalities : [raid0] [raid1] [raid6] [raid5] [raid4] [raid10] [linear]
unused devices: <none>

---------- Post added at 08:36 PM ---------- Previous post was at 08:35 PM ----------

In the meantime, I managed to connect to the internet (in the rescue mode of installation CD and chroot) but I can't do the "yum history undo last" since the systemd is labeled as Not available (I guess there are no older versions available in the repositories). Does anyone see a way how to downgrade it manually? There are actually 4 inavailable packages: systemd-units mdadm systemd systemd-sysv.

[BrianMicek]

Hi yman1,
Sorry about that, I re-read your jpeg and saw that your attempting to assemble a (device mapper) logical volume and not a RAID. It didn't help looking in /proc/mdstat, sorry. I can't offer much insight into working with those things because I've avoided using them for years now.

I regret what I did and that was to remove the broken portions of the boot sequence from systemctrl. For some reason, I was core dumping just like you until I avoided the problem then things worked fine. I'd like to think that if your logical volume was fixed, your problem would go away.

I did this because I was desperate and I didn't have time to figure out systemctrl. The idea is that there are static configuration files in /lib/systemd that are referenced by symbolic links in /etc/systemd. I isolated the problem areas by comparing these scripts with the failure output. I removed the problem areas by running systemctl disable SCRIPT until my problems went away.

From what I remember, the isolated area was invoked as a dependancy by another script which made things sort of tricky.