F16: Lost KDE, now can't even boot

[AlFrugal]

I've been running F16 since early December. Starting Tuesday March 20 I've experienced a rapid loss of function.

On Tuesday March 20 I was getting segment faults (nvidia-settings invoking libc) every five seconds over an eight-+ hour session. (I had the latest updates and was running kernel 3.2.10).

Wednesday, March 21, I could not log in to KDE (4.8) or Gnome. The login process got segment faults while invoking libc. I then selected "failsafe" mode at the login screen to get a terminal. I switched to root and got updates via "yum update".

Thursday March 22 I logged in to failsafe mode and got the latest updates, including the update to kernel 3.3.0. I attempted to reboot. The boot proceeded up to where sendmail is started and then did not progress further.

Any ideas on how I can get F16 back to normal?

[DBelton]

It appears you may have run into the prelink bug with the nvidia drivers

It's not hard to get back to normal if that's the issue, though

boot up and get to a console screen. (try booting normally, and ctrl-alt-F2 to get to a console.)

sign in as root and run

prelink -ua

If you are getting hit with the prelink bug, that should fix your errors. If it does, then you might want to look at either removing prelink, or blacklisting the nvidia drivers from being prelinked.

[AlFrugal]

DBelton: Thanks very much. Running prelink -ua allowed me to once again login
to KDE.

As noted in my OP, I can't boot kernel 3.3, so I booted kernel 3.2.10, logged
in to failsafe mode, and ran prelink -ua. Following this I tried again to boot
kernel 3.3. It still doesn't boot. So I rebooted kernel 3.2.10 where I was able
to login to KDE.

As for kernel 3.3 not booting, I browsed /var/log/messages. I note there: "kdm:
X server died during startup"

---------- Post added at 10:08 AM ---------- Previous post was at 09:40 AM ----------

Further investigating why kernel 3.3.0 doesn't boot shows it to also be an
nvidia driver issue.

My Xorg.O.log.old (for kernel 3.3.0 boot) shows "Failed to load the NVIDIA
kernel module"

That issue is discussed in this thread: "Kernel 3.3.0 update, nvidia kernel
module issue"

http://forums.fedoraforum.org/showthread.php?t=277911

[DBelton]

yea, I was thinking about it after I posted the above message and I kinda figured you were getting hit with two bugs rather than just the one I posted above.

Edit:

There is a note in this thread:

http://forums.fedoraforum.org/showthread.php?t=277911

About rpmfusion getting their nvidia akmod/kmod fixed. You may try re-installing your nvidia driver and see if it fixes your issues.