startup fail after upgrade from 2008 to 2009

[AlRoss]

Used the 2009 Powerpack DVD to upgrade from Spring 2008 to 2009.

 

A couple of oddities occurred during the upgrade including a big screenful of messages that were cunningly overlaid (read obscured) by a dialog box asking me for a YES or NO but no clue as to what the choice was about. Chose yes. OK I'm a gambler!

 

Anyway, after upgrade completed it wanted to update a heap of packages so went ahead and did that.

 

Now on reboot I find I'm offered a host of different login ID's including my own named one, admin, root, and a good dozen others that I do not recognise. The list features every name twice (adjacent entries) though clicking them selects the two adjacent entries together.

 

Trying to enter a password, keyboard does not respond

 

Boot to safe mode works but of course it is strictly console type of interface with which I am not at all familiar. Maybe I should just go away and put up with Windoze but I don't really wanna do that coz its a damn pain too.

 

I'm thinking about scrubbing the whole install and doing a NEW install. It shouldn't hurt that much as all my data files are on another partition and I didn't have that much added software yet.

 

Just before I take the radical route does anyone have any suggestions?

 

Thanks

 

Al

[adamw]

Boot to a console, login as root, and do 'urpmi --auto-update -v'. And also 'urpmi kdm'.

[AlRoss]

Boot to a console, login as root, and do 'urpmi --auto-update -v'. And also 'urpmi kdm'.

 

Thanks Adam,

 

Actually did that but to no avail. The only available road to a console is safe mode as ctrl-alt-F1 does not respond due to keyboard not responding. Safe mode comes up with keyboard active but urpmi --auto-update -v does exactly nothing. I wonder if the internet is not available in safe mode? urpmi kdm did something though it was entirely unclear what.

 

But whatever it did, did not do the trick.

 

Trying to login again got much the same results as before.

 

Trying the "restart X-server" from the login dialog got me a chance to enter a password but promptly produced an error message reporting something fatal in kdm and would I please refer to the logfile. Then it all died and back to square 1.

 

My wee brother keeps telling me I'll be much better off with Linux. Mind you his "look at how easy this is" demos always leave me wondering how (and why?) he remembers all those console commands. but Windoze really is dire so I am gonna persist despite the setbacks. Unless anyone else has any genius ideas on how to wriggle free of this mess I'll just wipe and re-install - always hoping that 2009 doesn't do ehat 2008 did and wipe my windoze partition. Gee this is fun :unsure:

 

Al

[AlRoss]

Unless anyone else has any genius ideas on how to wriggle free of this mess I'll just wipe and re-install - always hoping that 2009 doesn't do what 2008 did and wipe my windoze partition. Gee this is fun :unsure:

 

Well, happily complete re-install did work fine and it preserved my other partitions too. And the end result is good.

 

I'm still nervous with Linux though but keeping going.

 

Al

[mindwave]

al

 

I think with some persistence and practice you'll find yourself loving MDV

 

WHen I first started the swap I was a Win2k Admin and was appalled at all the "patches a brand new XP pc had just to boot on day 1

 

back then, mandrake 7, i reinstalled about every 3 days because I'd fubar something.

 

but now,it is my prime OS on all my pc;s and laptops, windows is only used for work and i only reinstall when i upgrade.

 

every now and then i try another distro , but i always come back to MDV