Judging from the frequency of my messages here one could think that I'm too stupid to upgrade a workstation to 5.2 (but the servers I've tried work without problem)
OK. The problem: I've tried to upgrade a 5.1-x86_64-workstation to 5.2. During the upgrade immidiatly after (according to the /var/log/messages) upgrading the two (64 & 32-bit) libgcc-packages an EXT3-error occurs and the root-partition gets remounted in read-only-mode. Consequently ALL following package upgrades throw errors saying this or that can't be done because he can't write to /etc, /usr but in the end yum says everything is OK.
(Side info: /var is on a different partition, so it is still writeable)
At reboot the machine wants a manual fsck which throws a lot of errors. Then the machine reboots with with a lot of error messages (basically because it can't find /lib64/libgcc_s.so.1 (nothing a symlink can't fix). After that I try to fix things by manually upgrading the libgcc-packages (otherwise yum won'T run). "rpm -q" for selected packages shows that the majority of the packages is still in 5.1-state. Trying to "yum upgrade" again fail because the machine can't find any servers (but network functionality seems OK)
So I try to reboot. And now the really strange thing happens: A simple "rpm -q rpm" says that no rpm is installed. Rebuilding the rpm-database doesn't help.
So I'm a bit stuck here with a machine that is in limbo.
My questions: what could have been the cause for this (the machine was working OK before that). The only thing I feel a little guilty about was deinstalling the nvidia-kernel-driver and not reboot, but this can't f### up the file-system, can it?
Any suggestions what I can do to get the machine into a normal state again (apart from reinstall from scratch)