[aclug-L] Re: kernel updates

[James Williams <williamj@xxxxxxx>]

On Thu, 22 Oct 1998 Todd_Lundstedt@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:

> 
> Have patience with me, I am very new at this....
> I have RH5.1.
> I download several of the update RPMs from the RH ftp site and, including
[Stuff about new kernel problems snipped]

I think I know what your problem is here.  You mentioned that you are
booting off a floppy.  Your kernel is actually stored on the floppy.  When
you boot up, the computer reads the kernel off the floppy, then switches
to your hard drive to do the rest of the boot sequence.  When you upgraded
your kernel, your floppy unfortunately wasn't upgraded as well.  To fix
the problem, here is what you need to do.

1) Find a new floppy to put your 2.0.35 kernel on.  I want you to put your
existing floppy somewhere safe.  That way, if the steps I'm giving you
fail, you will still at least have a way to get into your computer.

2) Find your kernel.  It believe it will be in your /boot directory.  Look
for a file whose name starts with vmlinuz-2.0.35.  It may also have a dash
and another number appended to the end of the filename.

3) You will need to copy this file to your new floppy, so put your floppy
into the drive, and enter the following command:

  dd if=/boot/vmlinuz=2.0.35 of=/dev/fd0

If your kernel image was not called "vmlinuz-2.0.35" exactly, replace the
name I used above with your actual kernel filename.

4) The floppy drive should run for a minute or so, then spit out a message
something like "868+1 records in; 868+1 records out".  The numbers may be
different, though.  Now for the moment of truth - reboot your machine and
see if it will boot of the new floppy.  If not, put your old floppy back
in and reboot.

5) During bootup, you will most likely still see the messages about
"modprobe: can't locate module net-pf-4" and -pf-5.  These are harmless,
but you can get rid of them by adding the following two lines to your
/etc/conf.modules files:

alias net-pf-4 off
alias net-pf-5 off

You also mentioned that you want to be able to boot off the hard drive.
You will probably need to update you /etc/lilo.conf file.  I don't know if
the RPMS you installed would have updated them or not (I would imagine
not).  Look for a line that reads:

image = /boot/vmlinuz-2.0.34-0.6

This is telling LILO where to find your kernel image.  Change the filename
to the name of your new kernel image (from step 2 above), and save the
file.  Now, run "lilo" from the command prompt.  This will write out the
new MBR, and you should be able to boot from your hard drive (just
remember to remove your floppy before rebooting). 

As for resizing your filesystems, this one is a little bit trickier.  I
seem to remember hearing that Partition Magic 4.0 can resize an ext2
filesystem.  That's the only non-destructive way of doing it, as far as I
know.  The other way would be to back up your data, re-partition your
drive, then restore the data.  But that's a lot of work, and it's full of
complications unless you are just installing a fresh install.

Redhat supposedly has a way to allow you to increase the size of your
filesystems, assuming you left space on your drive for expanding during 
the install, but I've never got it to work correctly.

-- 
           /   AIX     | James Williams
   i386   /\   Irix    | williamj@xxxxxxx
PA_RISC __\ \  Sco     |
  Sparc \ \\// OSF     | If NT crashes in the forest, and nobody is around
PowerPC  \///  Linux   | to hear it, does it make a sound?
 RS6000  ///\  FreeBSD |
  Alpha //\\_\ Ultrix  |
   MIPS  \ \   Xenix   |
MC68000   \/   Solaris |
          /    HPUX    |


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