Kernel Upgrade

[yongbeng]

Recently, I tried upgrading my kernel but it failed..now..I could login to neither of the kernel..so..my question is this. I have a XP installed on another partition. if i re-install my redhat all over again, what do i need to do? format the partition of my linux? will it affect my bootup to XP process?

And last but not least. is there anyone who can advice on what are the main things to look out for when upgrading a kernel? thanks!

[jrbishop79]

reinstalling RedHat shouldn't affect your XP install... just be careful not to format your XP partition.... just go ahead and format your linus patrtitions and you should be ok..

[JohnT]

will it affect my bootup to XP process? Tough to answer as we're not knowledgable as to how you booted into XP before.

[daYz]

Originally posted by yongbeng
And last but not least. is there anyone who can advice on what are the main things to look out for when upgrading a kernel? thanks!

I'm on Gentoo so I don't know how to do it with Redhat, but I presume it doesn't differ a lot. What I do when the upgrade goes wrong is booting from a Gentoo livecd, I've heard it can be Knoppix too, mount my partitions, turn swap on and with chroot I'm in my Gentoo installation. I then can do all things like recompiling the kernel, edit the bootloader etc.

If you use Knoppix your hardisks will be mounted automaticly, your swap file will be turned on, so you'll only need to know what the command is to chroot into your Redhat installation. I think I have seen info about this at the Redhat site.

What I do on Gentoo is "chroot /mnt/gentoo /bin/bash"

[spizkapa]

Of course, you should be able to boot into your computer regardless of what linux distro you are using. Most, if not all, linux distros these days come on a bootable CD (or even DVD, as does my Debian) so you can boot from that.

The way it works is that it boots and waits for instructions. Assuming you haven't completely fscked the root partition, you should be able to boot into it. On Debian, this is normally achieved by typing something like "rescue =/dev/hda*" where * is the number of your root partition. The menu always has a help function which is normally accessible with the function keys.

Once you're logged in, you should be able to fix your problem. If the computer is not booting at all after the kernel compile I assume that it's probably a grub/lilo problem.

If you know what you're doing, you problem should, in theory, be fixable. If what I wrote sounds like bad-*** ninja hacking, you might have to reinstall.

Good luck.