Thank you very much for pointing that out. Ironically, there already was a proper link to vmlinuz.old in the / directory, I just didn't refer to it in the lilo.conf file. Now I can at least boot the old kernel directly from disk, instead of inserting the rescue floppy (a minor victory) :-).
As to your other points/questions about why I bother with all of the various choices (repetitious given the ability to pass parameters on the boot: prompt), the answer is simple, and again shows my immense ignorance of the entire boot process.
Because this is at it's base a Xandros install, I am currently stuck with the Xandros splash screen, even though I am only running their kernel, with everything else now "dist-upgraded" to sid/unstable. Their splash screen _never_ presents a "boot:" prompt. If you select "Expert", then you get control, either via a boot prompt, or first a shell, and only when you exit the shell does the rest of the boot continue (I don't remember, and I can't boot that way now, since I am currently pointing to the new kernel, which won't boot...).
So, all of those choices are in there just because I can _only_ choose parameters via the menu, and not via the prompt. I know exactly what you mean though, because when I boot off of the Debian CD, I get a proper boot prompt.
Lastly, I have taxed this kind list enough, and I thank you for all of your help. I will likely give up bending this installation into what I want, and revert to the better advice I got from a number of you and install Woody (or Knoppix, etc.) first, and upgrade from there. I think this is a Xandros issue, taking too much control and making it harder to upgrade... But, for completeness sake only, I will list my current error messages in trying to boot the 2.6.4 kernel. If you know the answer, I'd appreciate the feedback, but at this point, none is expected :-)
*******************************************************************
VFS: Can't find a Minix or Minix V2 filesystem on device hda2.
mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev2/root2, or
too many mounted filesystems
Unable to identify CD-ROM format.
mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev2/root2, or
too many mounted filesystems
Found reiserfs format "3.6" with standard journal
reiserfs journal params: ..... (lots of stuff here) ...
reiserfs: checking transaction log (hda2) for (hda2)
Using r5 hash to sort names
/sbin/init: 347: cannot open dev/console: No such file
Kernel panic: Attempted to kill init!*******************************************************************
I hand-typed the above, since I couldn't copy/paste from a hung console. So, apologies for any typos, missed capitalizations, etc. That's why I abbreviated the reiserfs params line, which was multiple lines of output that looked reasonable :-)
Thanks again to all of you!
s. keeling wrote:
So far so good, assuming /vmlinuz is a link pointing to /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.4-1-686
image=/vmlinuz label=Safe_2.4.22 vga=0xf04 root=/dev/hda2 initrd=/boot/initrd-2.4.22-x1.gz append="3 rw acpi=on "Why does this one ---^ use the same as the two before it? That should be:
image=/vmlinuz.old
(or something) and you should do:
ln -s /boot/vmlinuz-2.4.22-x1 /vmlinuz.old
image=/vmlinuz label=Expert vga=normal root=/dev/hda2 initrd=/boot/initrd-2.6.4-1-686.gz append="single rw acpi=on "
And that's wretched excess. You already have 2.6.4-1-686 defined above (the top two), and anything you're doing with any of them can be done with boot prompt parameters (vga, acpi, single).
That's probably what you need to sort out. However, you're also using reiserfs and devfs, two things I've never bothered with so it's time to hand off to others.
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