Yesterday I decided it was time to upgrade my Fedora 34 system and since the official Fedora Docs state, that an upgrade between two releases is tested and should be fine, I choose to go straight to 36.
So I followed the procedure in the docs and everything went fine. The upgrade finished, I booted into the new Release, everything was where it should be and I just spent the rest of the evening browsing. System shutdown was also the usual without any hiccups.
Now the wierd part.
When I turned the system on today and the screen for choosing between the last few kernels came on, there should have been kernel 5.17.something corresponding to the 36 release. But instead there were now only number 5.0.16, 5.0.13 and 5.0.7 to choose from, which correspond to Fedora 28. (???)
All of them fail to start because they can’t find the kernel and the rescue version throws a bunch of errors and ultimately gets stuck at ‘Failed to start systemd-logind.service’.
Before I start with a new install, I wanted to see if anyone of you have seen or heard of such behavior? It worked fine right after the upgrade and I swear I only browsed a bit and then turned it off.
Hello nx2l,
I only skipped 35 because the docs said it would be fine and I did not want to do it twice. So, pure laziness. I do have only one boot drive and one data drive which, as the name implies, dosen’t hold an os or other programs for that matter.
Sounds like the system did not build the initrd/initram for the boot process. If you are using Grub, you should be able to edit one of the entries to manually type in the name of the initrd and vmlinux file and boot that way.
If you are on uEFI, then you may be able to use the boot menu to boot directly into Fedora or you can use an EFI shell to browse the drive and see what the vmlinux and initrd are actually called to do the above.
The other items probably fail because the kernel hooks for systemd are probably too new compared to what is in the old kernels.