It is very strange but here is, what formed the solution!!! After mounting the partitions, chroot sysimage bash started Yast. Uninstalled k_athlon... installed k_athlon...old exit yast mkinitrd lilo umount all reboot. It looks that the ft3xx driver now is loaded and working properly, not sure how...since I only installed the driver in the rescue option. As a result on startup before bios, fasttrack initializes and lilo starts up the system. Everything is working fine. Thank you for your help & advice Sandu. I will be a lot more carefull from now on. -savvas Στις 09/Σεπ/2004, ημέρα Πέμπτη και ώρα 16:06, ο/η Sandu Mihai έγραψε:

The mkinitrd command must be run from inside a CHROOTED shell onto the sysimage directory. After the mounts, do: chroot sysimage bash

then run /sbin/mkinitrd

Savvas Ladopoulos wrote:

...

Sorry for the delay, had to do some reading.

I was able to mount the system and did :

Boot rescue mkdir sysimage mount /dev/sda2 sysimage mount /dev/sda1 sysimage/boot mount /dev/system/Home_VOlume sysimage/home mount /dev/system/Var_VOlume sysimage/var mount /dev/system/Usr_VOlume sysimage/usr mount /dev/system/Opt_VOlume sysimage/opt mount /dev/system/Srv_VOlume sysimage/srv mount /dev/system/Tmp_VOlume sysimage/tmp

/sbin/mkinitrd exit umount sysimage/tmp umount sysimage/srv umount sysimage/opt umount sysimage/usr umount sysimage/var umount sysimage/home umount sysimage/boot

sync reboot

however i do get the same kernel panic! The good thing is that i was able to mount the Reiserfs. Mkinitrd did not load the fasttrack driver as seem from boot output. even if it was seen when run mkinitrd.

-savvas

Στις 08/Σεπ/2004, ημέρα Τετάρτη και ώρα 08:13, ο/η Sandu Mihai έγραψε:

...

On a second tought:

Boot rescue Mount system under a directory chroot directory bash /sbin/mkinitrd exit reboot

Eg. for a system that has: /dev/sda1 - boot /dev/sda2 - root /dev/sda3 - var /dev/sda4 - swap

Boot rescue mkdir sysimage mount /dev/sda2 sysimage mount /dev/sda1 sysimage/boot mount /dev/sda3 sysimage/var

...

/sbin/mkinitrd exit umount sysimage/var umount sysimage/boot umount sysimage sync sync sync ctrl-alt-del

It seems that the kernel update probably did not run mkinitrd to refresh the initrd (are you using SCSI or Ext3/Reiserfs probably).

Sandu Mihai GTS Telecom Network Engineer RHCE #807202946505274

S andu Mihai wrote:

...

First of all,

it is bad practice (tm) to directly update an important production server. Even with a trusted method of updates. One of the good practices include : - mirroring internally an external available source - testing updates on a set of servers / a server that mirror the behavior of the real target of updates - never let an external program directly update the kernel, rather do it by hand using rpm -i and not rpm -F, and then add the new kernel in Grub/Lilo if rpm -i dose not do it automatically (Redhat seemed to do that) You can undo that by : Booting in rescue mode, mounting the partitions of the system under a created directory in the RAM disk, copy the k_athlon...rpm from the first install CD in that directory, chroot <directory> bash, rpm -i k_athlon....rpm, vi /etc/lilo.conf or vi /boot/grub/menu.lst,/sbin/lilo (only if using lilo), exit Then, umount the partitions mounted under the directory, reboot. These are basic rescue methods one should be aware of , in case ugly things happen to kernel, or to some interesting files of the system (/etc/fstab is my favorite) Sorry for the not quite detailed description of the rescue steps, if these steps are really requested by the list I will then send a near-to-reality-step-by-step scenario.

Best regards,

Sandu Mihai GTS Telecom Network Engineer RHCE #807202946505274

Savvas Ladopoulos wrote:

...

Just read "Bad quality of updates from SuSE ftp server" and now I understand what went wrong to my suse 9.0 update via YOU. Thank you all.

However, I need some quidance on what to do next. I am left with "kernel panic: VFS can not mount root fs on 08:02". I managed with rescue to mount boot but I am not sure if I can undo the 2.4.21-243-athlon image to the previous version of 2.4.21-99-athlon?

please any advise is much appreciated.

-Savvas