Dr R L Oswald wrote:
Mystery Solved! Karanbir Singh gave a clue by suggesting the dsiabling of the splash screen at which point the magic word "LILO" flashed up briefly on the screen.
It appears that the machines which were affected all had lilo installed but not configured as bootloader. These machines are all configured
If the word LILO pop'ed up - then it is setup to be the bootloader. And would explain why changes to grub.conf were having no effect.
identically using a kickstart script. This script does not have lilo enabled in the bootloader. How they actually came to have lilo installed is a bit of a mystery as all the rest plainly do not have it. However
try "rpm -qa --last"
That should give you an idea as to when the packages were installed.
when the kernel update was installed by yum, it looked for a bootloader & picked on lilo instead of grub in machines with lilo installed.
I the log files of affected systems:
Kernel Updated/Installed, checking for bootloader Lilo found - adding kernel to lilo and making it the default
If you are interested in the process, look at /sbin/new-kernel-pkg - thats the script called to install / remove config's for a kernel package.
- K