I almost resurrected the kernel panic thread I had going back in Oct. Frankly it happened again on that same flash stick so I am disposing of the physical stick. I have never had another /boot stick "jam me" after an upgrade of the kernel. Debian stable came down with a new image on 2-29 and I updated my system. Went fine and the next day during boot --- bang kernel panic. I have no less than 5 Debian systems all running the 2-29 image without any issues at all. I keep a spare /boot flash that hasn't been "online" since Aug last year. Its a perfect copy of the original including UUID and everything. I insert that spare and Debian fires right up no problems. Of course when I do a uname -a in the terminal the image from months ago is what is loaded. I know the hard drive is current because I just updated it yesterday and all went well. Need some help or ideas here: Deciding to update the /boot I opened a terminal and ran a grub update/install on sdb (my flash). Reported full write and no errors at all. I watched the stick's blinking light while the write happened. Apparently it did nothing because I rebooted the OS and it still shows the old kernel/image in the terminal. How to solve this issue? Should I just strip this /boot stick down and start over? I have access to my optical tray with the Debian install DVR so I could do the restore. I am fairly convinced that had I thrown away that flash stick last year when this happened, I would not have experienced this again. Same exact everything on 5 systems and this one stick is the same culprit again. Little critter had to go.
Updating GRUB shouldn't be enough, IMO. There's another thing that debian does to update the Kernel image, but I can't get a hold of that right now. I'll look on a few e-Mails that I exchanged with a Debian developer regarding an issue while booting, there's probably some help there. Hold on. Have you tried updating the initramfs?
Thanks and no hurry. The system in question is for my Debian family computer. Its generic and simple to rebuild if I need to. I have sector images so its like 20 minutes to restore on usb3. I want to learn not simply blow away the problem. In the meantime I have other systems to use. I don't want to short-circuit the learning curve or I'ld put in the Deb installer and use rescue mode. That may be the solution, but again I'll never really know what happened if I do that. Do I think to much? LOL!! No I have also considered using synaptic and removing all images down to the current one on the working flash. Then I would let Debian do the apt-get stuff to update everything to current. Might be a fun experiment. I have too much time on my hands.
Might be a solution too. You could boot this debian with a working usb stick, then remove it, then insert the borked stick and mount it as /boot. Then do the synaptic procedure. Remember to have a backup of the working stick once you get it working. This way you can just restore it later.
Why is junk like this considered fun by me? I mean it really is in a way. I am not using the borked stick because it did it to me already before. I am going to use a brand new stick and the borked one is physically suspect to me. No other stick I own has ever done this to me. I read around and physical issues on a flash do happen more than you might think.
Sometimes they can behave strangely. Like when my DVD-RW's don't match the sha512sum for some Linux distros, but do for Windows ISO's
What I am going to post may be really obvious to many of you but it caught me off guard. First off I solved this issue easily be writing back a sector image from before 2-29 (latest Deb image sent down). After mounting the Deb OS with the older image I was able to apt-get all the updates and the bootflash updated courtesy of Deb and all is OK now. Lesson learned: Since I made the decision to operate Deb using a removable /boot flash stick I have now configured my backup strategy to include a dd of the bootflash being made at the same time I backup the OS. This way both will match and restore seamlessly and with little effort. I did a restore using this method to test it and of course it was smooth. I use small 1 GB bootflash sticks and a dd copy takes 90 seconds, which makes this a no brainer. While my stored bootflash backups (actual physical sticks) work, they obviously maintain only the update image available at the time they were created. After a few months they are way behind and not worth too much. So I learned something here about the inter-play between these and Debian. Writing the current bootflash image back to a stick takes about 10 minutes and that is easy too. I have done this a few times this weekend as a test and they all work fine. Lesson learned.
