[CentOS] Yum update gone bad...

Fri May 15 15:37:29 UTC 2009
nate <centos at linuxpowered.net>

Anthony Kamau wrote:
> Morning list!
>
> I have a situation that was brought about by a system crash during a yum
> update.  The motherboard suffered a catastrophic failure due to busted
> CAPS.  Lucky for me (or so I thought at the time), I had a spare,
> identical motherboard as the one that failed.  I replaced the dud board
> and rebooted.  This machine runs headless and is my primary
> (personal/home) mail server.  I normally access the booting console via
> hyper terminal when I need to change boot parameters or just watch the
> system boot up!
>
> Getting to the point, nothing comes up at all on the terminal screen.
> So I hooked up a monitor and keyboard (even a mouse) to check what was
> going on.  What I noticed immediately was that the kernel screen
> selection screen did not appear!  Instead, I just got a message at the
> bottom on the screen stating "Grub Loading Stage 2" or something to that
> effect.  Straight from there, was the usual scrolling text up to the
> point where SELinux starts.  Then nothing displays at all until the
> final login screen.  Not even the "Nash" screen that prompts one to
> enter "I" for interactive start-up appeared!

Sounds like you have a serial console configured. Look in your grub.conf
for the serial settings, disable them if your not using a serial console
and want to see those messages. I believe you can also add another
option to the kernel to show the messages in both locations though
I don't recall the syntax off hand, it's been a long time since I
did that. console=tty0 or something similar.

nate