[CentOS] Root-filesystem remounts as read-only during 5.2 upgrade (system completely shoot)
Bernhard Gschaider
bgschaid_lists at ice-sf.at
Wed Jun 25 18:27:21 UTC 2008
OK. I managed to beat the machine into submission. But a slight
incertainty remains.
>>>>> On Wed, 25 Jun 2008 18:34:26 +0200
>>>>> "BG" == Bernhard Gschaider <bgschaid_lists at ice-sf.at> wrote:
BG> Judging from the frequency of my messages here one could think
BG> that I'm too stupid to upgrade a workstation to 5.2 (but the
BG> servers I've tried work without problem)
BG> OK. The problem: I've tried to upgrade a
BG> 5.1-x86_64-workstation to 5.2. During the upgrade immidiatly
BG> after (according to the /var/log/messages) upgrading the two
BG> (64 & 32-bit) libgcc-packages an EXT3-error occurs and the
BG> root-partition gets remounted in read-only-mode. Consequently
BG> ALL following package upgrades throw errors saying this or
BG> that can't be done because he can't write to /etc, /usr but in
BG> the end yum says everything is OK.
BG> (Side info: /var is on a different partition, so it is still
BG> writeable)
That is my problem: Did that step of the "upgrade" leave the
rpm-database in a state that is not in tune with what is actually on
the disk
BG> At reboot the machine wants a manual fsck which throws a lot
BG> of errors. Then the machine reboots with with a lot of error
BG> messages (basically because it can't find /lib64/libgcc_s.so.1
BG> (nothing a symlink can't fix). After that I try to fix things
BG> by manually upgrading the libgcc-packages (otherwise yum won'T
BG> run). "rpm -q" for selected packages shows that the majority
BG> of the packages is still in 5.1-state. Trying to "yum
BG> upgrade" again fail because the machine can't find any servers
BG> (but network functionality seems OK)
The problem was that the centos-release was removed at the start of
the upgrade (and that is needed by yum to determine which $releasever
to use)
BG> So I try to reboot. And now the really strange thing happens:
BG> A simple "rpm -q rpm" says that no rpm is
BG> installed. Rebuilding the rpm-database doesn't help.
BG> So I'm a bit stuck here with a machine that is in limbo.
By manually reinstalling the rpm.rpm and some other packages I managed
to kickstart the upgrade again (and it seems to have succeeded)
Only problem: in the second upgrade run less packages were listed as
due to be updated (roughly a half). So I'm not sure: Are they marked
as upgraded in the rpm-database but in reality there are the old
versions on the disk.
Is there a way to say: "Hey RPM, have a look whether really the files
in your database are on the disk)" ?
BG> My questions: what could have been the cause for this (the
BG> machine was working OK before that). The only thing I feel a
BG> little guilty about was deinstalling the nvidia-kernel-driver
BG> and not reboot, but this can't f### up the file-system, can
BG> it?
That question remains. But it is academic
BG> Any suggestions what I can do to get the machine into a normal
BG> state again (apart from reinstall from scratch)
As I said: solved
Thanks for listening
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