How do you repair/reinstall Fedora without deleting any existing partitions or data?
I was attempting to upgrade some old Fedora 13 servers to 17, following the instructions in the wiki. After the 14->15 upgrade, rebooting resulted in the output:
Dropping to debug shell.
sh: can't access tty; job control turned off
dracut:/#
Running dmesg also shows:
dracut Warning: No root device "block:/dev/mapper/VolGroup-lv_root" found
Googling shows this error is typically related to some weird RAID issues, but my server is a virtual machine not using any RAID. Using a rescue CD, I can chroot /mnt/sysimage
, and all packages and data still seems to be there. How do I make the system bootable again?
Best Answer
Apparently, it's not uncommon for Fedora's upgrade process to corrupt the /boot/initramfs filesystem, resulting in an unbootable system.
Using a tip I found here, the solution is to boot using a Fedora Live CD, and select "rescue installed system" from the menu. Then walk through the menu to get to the rescue shell. Then mount the system using
chroot /mnt/sysimage
. The tip recommended repairing initramfs by running:However, since you'll be running the Live CD's kernel, this will likely fail if your system's kernel version does not exactly match the Live CD. My Live CD was using a 2.6.* kernel, but I had a 3.4.* kernel installed, so I ran:
Afterwards, removing the Live CD and then rebooting resulted in a bootable system.