Can't boot. Other than that, everything works great

[pottzie]

Just did dist-upgrade on an old, Pentium III Thinkpad. Got some warnings, ignored them like I always do. Now after rebooting, I get "decompressing kernel...parsing ELF....done (Then) Booting the kernel

And then just a blinking cursor and a black screen......forever.

I'm guessing that I have to load a live CD and do, uh,..something, but only 'da good lord knows what that something is, so I came here asking. How do I fix this thing?

Thanks.

[swftech]

To get the quickest possible help, mention the exact release codename in your post (uname -a is a good idea, too). Due to the lack of crystal balls, attach the output of lspci -nnk if you encounter hardware problems.

You came to the right place, just need you to add a little of ^ that and then we'll go from there.

Got some warnings, ignored them like I always do.

That's not a good idea either, so how bout we start again if you want some help? :)

Also at the forever blinking cursor try to log in to tty.. ctrl+alt+f1 report back.

[pottzie]

Well....checked the Home page, saw that there's a new LXDE version available, and thought that might be a better way to go. So I'm downloading that, and waiting for it to complete.

That said, this is running Openbox, had just updated. Doesn't appear to be a kernel issue, I can select any kernel from Grub, still does the same thing. Without loading a live CD, I can't get to a terminal.

Ctrl/Alt/f1 doesn't change anything. This is all happening before the kernel is initiated.

[swftech]

Too bad we can't know what the ignored warnings were :P
Is the Openbox spin from the BBQ? Were you running Darkside or penbang?
Btw, you will like Coal, and pidsley wrote a great tutorial here http://linuxbbq.org/bbs/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=510 in case you wanna have a look.

[machinebacon]

Seems that it is either systemd doing a fsck (did you add new partitions recently?) or recently a GRUB2 upgrade wasn't carried out correctly (ignored warnings?)
You can try to boot again, press 'e' in the boot menu, move the cursor to the part where it says init=/bin/systemd and remove this. Then press F10 to boot. It will use the traditional sysV (doesn't work on Coal, by the way!)

[pottzie]

Yeah, I'm a fan of LXDE anyway, and I've seen that LXDE is teaming up with another group and leaning towards qt. And it will also give me a fresh live cd to look at whatever happened on this install, maybe. I did the upgrade as I was about to go somewhere, and just hit "Yeah, whatever," when the warnings came up. Hell, what upgrade doesn't tell me that the entire box is going to hell if I proceed. Usually, it all works anyway.

Usually.

Tried the 'e' during grub, then removing init=/bin/systemd. No change when I hit f10, still stops at the same line.

[machinebacon]

Ok, I see you're not married to your existing installation, so go for Coal (in South Korea, go for Coal in 88)

[BBvideo 560,340]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GAnmSvB0Qag[/BBvideo]

After successful installation, please dance like one of the clowns there.

[ivanovnegro]

Next time do not ignore the warnings. When you see such, post in the support forum or in "Upgrade Warnings". It exists for a reason and we provide apt-listbugs for a reason, otherwise you won't see any warnings and bork your system equally.