[CentOS] lost connection during yum update

Sun Mar 10 23:00:56 UTC 2013
Frank Cox <theatre at melvilletheatre.com>

On Sun, 10 Mar 2013 11:04:37 -0600
Frank Cox wrote:

> > It may be easier to restore from backup and then attempt to do the update
> > again.
> 
> Perhaps, but since everything seems to still be in place on those hard drives,
> and since my last "yum update" completed without any errors being reported, I
> suspect (hope?) that everything is still ok with the exception of whatever is
> causing the machines to fail to boot.

It's looking more and more like a full nuke-and-pave is going to be the answer
here.

As I suspected, initramfs-2.6.32-358.0.1 was missing in /boot.  Unfortunately,
none of the other installed kernels boot either -- everything gives me a kernel
panic.

I  did a yum remove kernel-2.6.32-358.0.1 and yum install kernel-2.6.32-358.0.1
and the whole transaction appeared to be successful.

That got me  initramfs-2.6.32-358.0.1 back in /boot, but I still get a kernel
panic when I reboot the machine.  The initial rhgb screen comes up and the
little circle thing cranks for a minute or so, but then I get "kernel panic:
attempted to kill init!". Booting without rhgb gives me a cursor in the top
left corner for a minute, followed by "kernel panic: attemtped to kill init!".
The last time /var/log/boot.log was written to was the last time the machine was
rebooted prior to this whole episode (i.e. a few weeks ago) so there is
absolutely no error message or log information available other than the kernel
panic message on the screen.

Damn, I hate the idea of having to set all of these machines up again from
scratch.  Two of them aren't much to re-do, but the third one is the office
workhorse machine that does everything from dhcp server to nfs server to print
server to you-name-it.

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