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By Ryan, 7 Apr 2010 9:30 am

Recently I had a problem with my nvidia driver and kernel which crippled my machine at boot-up. After the grub screen the pretty plymouth eye candy never appeared, the monitor went into power-saving mode, and I couldn’t even access a local console with Ctrl-Alt-F2.

Normally I would have reverted to a previous kernel, but in this instance the machine had just been clean installed with web repositories, so it only had the broken kernel. To make matters even worse, the DNS server refused to return information about the machine, which had registered with DHCP, but hadn’t sent the host name. Since I didn’t know the IP, I couldn’t log in with SSH.

Single User mode to the rescue! This is the perfect use for a single user login. The procedure is pretty simple, as far as Linux recovery steps go.

1. Interrupt grub at startup and press ‘a‘ to edit the kernel line.
2. Remove the ‘rhgb‘ and ‘quiet‘ options and replace them with ‘single‘
3. Boot the kernel with your modified options
4. Once the kernel boots, you can run disk checks or other repair activities.
5. In this case, I wanted to continue to a normal boot prompt, which is run-level three. On Fedora and other RedHat-derived systems simply type ‘init 3‘ at the single user prompt.

The machine will immediately continue with the boot sequence, starting other necessary services. The process stops at a login prompt. Hopefully you have instructions to assist in fixing the problem from there. When you are done you can issue a ‘reboot‘ and find out if you’ve fixed the problem!

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By Ryan, 23 Mar 2010 7:11 am

I recently updated my Fedora 12 workstation at work and was greeted with a black screen at reboot. Actually, the screen shut off almost immediately. The console was unresponsive, so I couldn’t even log in locally by switching to a local console. (You know you are in trouble when Ctrl-Alt-F2 doesn’t work.)

From my laptop I SSH’d in and discovered that the nvidia driver had oops’d and killed X11 very dead. Searching the forums led me to believe my problem was from the most recent kernel update and selecting the previous kernel from the grub screen proved to boot normally.

This is the first occasion where I’ve ever needed to blacklist an item from yum. The process is pretty simple, so I’m jotting it down here for future reference.

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