[CentOS] lost connection during yum update

Sun Mar 10 23:29:56 UTC 2013
Gerry Reno <greno at verizon.net>

On 03/10/2013 07:00 PM, Frank Cox wrote:
> 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.
>

Did you try booting a rescue disk and reinstalling the bootloader?