Contrary to my earlier conclusion, the upgrade did not delete older images. It appears a ramdisk generation change may have included a bad module whose loading crashed the system later.
I could not boot other images because my Grub 2 configuration file grub.cfg missed the corresponding "initrd" lines. The latter were missing probably because of a ramdisk generation failure. This resulted in a cryptic error message at the boot failure about inability to find a root filesystem in a certain (0,0) disk. As I mentioned earlier, after loading to a shell prompt by editing the "linux" line in grub boot screen and adding init=/bin/bash, I could disable swapping with swapoff -a, remount the root partition in a read-write mode and start networking. This allowed me to update packages in aptitude. I also had to boot off a recent Debian installer CD-R disk, http://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/daily-builds/unstable/current/i386/iso-cd/ because I did not understand the reason for the (0,0) root disk mount crash. I also suspect that my manual invocation of update-initramfs failed to include all required modules. In the end, I dropped to shell from the rescue disk, mounted my root filesystem with "mount -t ext3 /dev/sda1 /mnt" and changed to it with "chroot /mnt". I then re-generated the initial ramdisk images with update-initramfs -k 2.6.32-5-686 -d update-initramfs -k 2.6.32-5-686 -c and same commands for some other kernel versions. This allowed me to boot my system in full with 2.6.32-5-686 which turned to be the original kernel version that worked long time for me. (The newer 2.6.38..-686 kernel on which 2.6-686 depends crashes in the Wi-Fi module mac80211 calling a function in cfg80211 when I attempt to associate with my Wi-Fi router. I logged that issue under bug #622833). Still, I do not understand how possible differences in update-initramfs could cause a libata kernel crash. -- -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-kernel-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/20110422135659.ga5...@ei.homeip.net