On 10/08/2015 12:37 AM, Brad Rogers wrote:
Thanks. Well I do not have GRUB here but LILO, and there are no saved
old kernels as long as I know.
There should be; Debian doesn't delete old kernels as part of the
upgrade process. Even LILO should have an option to boot older
kernels. Older kernels are deliberately kept such that, if the new
kernel *does* fail, you can still, hopefully, use a previous one. It's
been a long time since I used LILO, so can't advise how to access those
old kernels.
In fact, (and in my case) LILO does delete old kernels during the
upgrade, however I always had two opportunities for booting the system
(one kernel of 486 category a.k.a. "older machines", the other of
686-pae type for "modern machines"). During all kernel upgrades up to
now (since squeeze 6.0.1a to wheezy 7.9) both kernels had been replaced
by newer versions at the same time, and I was always able to restart the
system without issues. This was the first time that both kernel variants
failed to boot.
archived in /var/cache/apt/archives as .deb packages. For example,
Those are an artefact of the install process; You appear not to be
deleting packages once installed successfully. Nothing wrong with
that, but you can end up short on disk space that way. This lack of
space can lead to booting issues.
Well, there were just few .deb packages of the last known kernels there
- so not much space was occupied. And I had luck with them because I
used them to reinstall the previous (good) kernel images without
downloading them again :-) So it seems that keeping those packages in
cache for a while was actually useful. Thanks anyway.