[buug] Trapped in Upgrade Hell

[Ian Zimmerman]

Joe> So I gave up on that and tried to upgrade to Mandrake 9.2, having
Joe> understood that to be relatively foolproof. It wasn't. The system
Joe> now bombs out while trying to boot. I recall seeing several
Joe> permissions errors on /dev. And it throws me into having to do
Joe> maintenance as root when it's unable to do an fsck on
Joe> /dev/hda2. When I go in as root, I see that /dev has no hda or
Joe> hda2. Following what documentation I've understood, I try to create
Joe> that with the mknod command, after which I can do the fsck. But
Joe> when I come out of the root shell and reboot, /dev/hda2 is gone
Joe> again.
 
Joe> However, when I boot up from a Knoppix Live CD and look at what's
Joe> in its /mnt/hda2/dev directory, I see thousands of items, as
Joe> opposed to the couple of dozen that would show up for it under
Joe> Mandrake, including
 
Joe> Does this mean that the items are there but that Mandrake refuses
Joe> to see them, or that Knoppix is creating them but destroying them
Joe> when it shuts down, or... uh... something else? I understand that
Joe> these are, in some mystical way, files-but-not-files, but what that
Joe> means in a practical sense is a complete mystery.
 
Joe> Is there anyway to turn this back into a usable, bootable machine?
Joe> I am well beyond frustration here, and the people I tell about this
Joe> keep asking me why I don't just get an operating system that
Joe> works. If I weren't locked into Linux (as far as I can understand)
Joe> by having 100 GB of data on an ext3 filesystem that other OS's
Joe> can't read, I'd be sorely tempted to give up and get back to
Joe> actually using my computer instead of having to spend all my time
Joe> configuring, debugging, and yelling at it.
 
Joe> Is there any further information I can provide? I am off the edge
Joe> of my knowledge and, after 7 years of slamming my head against
Joe> trying to get Linux systems working, quite near the edge of my
Joe> patience.

If it still matters, likely keywords to look for are initrd and devfs.

-- 
Nothing can be explained to a stone.
Or to a stoned person, either.