A series of steps here, and I don’t know which one broke it, but now when trying to boot I get a few error messages (but I was getting them before, too) too fast to note down, a new message (probably since the 9.5 upgrade) warning me my CPU is obsolete and will not be supported in some future release, then several minutes of a small arrow chasing its tail around and around then it shuts down with no other visible messages.
- prior to the 9.5 upgrade, I had a bunch of nvidia files that came up for updates when doing “sudo dnf update” but they wouldn’t install, for reasons like:
- file so-and-so from package such and such conflicts with file so-and-so from package such-and-such-later-version. I figured there were some other updates pending that weren’t ready yet.
- 9.5 became available so I did sudo dnf upgrade, which installed nearly 500 packages and rebooted fine, after.
- I then again did sudo dnf update and got the same batch of updates for nvidia (and a few other things) but could install them only if I excluded *nvidia*.
- tried several things in an attempt to get the nvidia updates installed, finally boiling down to “sudo dnf --allowerasing”, which seemed like all it should do is erase an existing package before installing an update for it. It appeared to do the trick, as dnf claimed to have installed everything.
- So, reboot…
- Nothing (useful) happens.
- it stops and hangs before getting to the grub boot menu, but as described above, eventually powers off without further visible output or further input from me.
I’ve got it booted, now, from a 9.5 live CD, and I can use the disks utility to examine the filesystems/partitions on the boot drives (a pair of SSDs in RAID1). some of them were reported as needing repair, so I ran the appropriate tool from a text console window, and after that disks said they were now good.
try reboot:
Nope. No such luck.
so, now I’m kinda trying to figure out where to go next. I know I COULD reinstall, but I’d really prefer not to.
Much of the non-system content that I put on it is actually on a NAS, but I’ve spent a year and a half tweaking things on the system to work the way I like, (and of course didn’t keep records) and don’t want to have to start all over.
I do have nightly/weekly/monthly backups, but apparently don’t have backup of /boot or /boot/efi.
Am thinking about reinstalling grub but have never done that before on a (previously) working system, so I am asking for pointers to details on EXACTLY what one needs to do to make that happen.
Also thinking that perhaps the initial ram disk may have gotten hosed. I have fixed those before, but it’s been some years, so any advice on that would also be helpful.
Hoping for a little guidance here, Thanks in advance!
Fred