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I am using Fedora 15, and want to upgrade to version 16. I followed the official link Upgrading Fedora using yum - FedoraProject to upgrade my OS by the following command:

yum update kernel* --releasever=16
yum groupupdate Base  --releasever=16
reboot

After reboot, the OS does not start. It just prints the following message on screen:

could not start boot splash: No such file or directory

and nothing else.

I have installed a lot of software on my previous OS, and I don't want to format my system partition. How to bring Fedora back to life without reinstalling the OS? Reinstall the OS would mean that I have to install a lot of software and do much configuration. It's a waste of time.

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I am assume that you have a problem with Grub that it isn't able to find your /boot partition and load the kernel from there. I would encourage you to hold the Shift key when you boot your system, then you shoud press e on the first line, and see if anything seems wrong there, in case you cann't find anything wrong, just copy the text and add it to your question, we could take you from there easily. – Hanan N. Nov 27 '11 at 14:58
The kernel was loaded . I guess the kernel hang while running or loading system services . But I don't know how to collect useful information while booting as I can't log in. – river Nov 28 '11 at 5:01
let us know if you can boot into rescue mode by appending the 1 number to your linux boot line at Grub. – Hanan N. Nov 28 '11 at 5:44
I am sorry for my late. I can't boot into rescue mode whether I append "linux rescue" or "s" or 1 number to my kernel parameter. – river Nov 28 '11 at 13:33
Is there any to trace the kernel booting process ? – river Nov 29 '11 at 7:26

migrated from stackoverflow.com Nov 27 '11 at 14:14

1 Answer

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Note: I dont know where you found those commands, but those are not the right procedure to upgrade a system using yum; which is actually a matter of just running yum --releasever=XX distro-sync after having updated yum to the latest version.

I think your problem depends on the fact that Fedora 16 uses grub2 as default, while previous releases have grub. Actually, the upgrade should have completed successfully, because even after removing the grub rpm, grub would still be installed in your master boot record, and be used after reboot.

Your best bet in this case is booting a live-cd or live-usb media, mounting all your hard drive partitions (except swap obviously) under a chosen directory, say /mnt/sysimage, then issuing as root:

# chroot /mnt/sysimage
(you are now in the root dir of your old system)
# /sbin/grub2-mkconfig -o /boot/grub2/grub.cfg
(this creates grub2 configuration file)
# /sbin/grub2-install --recheck /dev/sdX
(this installs grub2 in your MBR, replace sdX with your boot drive)

If everything went right, you could now boot into your system again, this time using grub2. Good luck

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