I upgraded one of my elderly and somewhat unloved Ubuntu boxes recently and on reboot the new kernel (2.6.32-24) failed to boot complaining that udev wasn’t configured. I have no idea what udev is.
Hmmm. It was late. What to do? Yes, emulate the best, most dedicated sysadmins! I went to bed and forgot about it for a few days.
Eventually I decided I ought to actually go and … you know … fix it. Or at least put the error message into Google and see what came back. Google tells me that udev isn’t configured, probably because the install actually didn’t complete properly.
One of the lovely things about Linux and especially the apt (Debian) based distros like Ubuntu is that several previous kernel versions are usually readily available to boot into. So I boot into a previous version and run dpkg -a –configure. Doesn’t work. Pants.
Try a system update. Also doesn’t work. Also Pants.
Use aptitude to reinstall udev. Also doesn’t work.
Ponder and cogitate on the problem.
Interestingly at around this point I finally notice that I’ve not been booting into a previous kernel version exactly as I’d meant to, but without paying enough attention into image-2.6.32-24-generic rather than image-2.6.32-24-386 (the default). Light slowly dawns and I use aptitude to reinstall the -386 version.
sudo aptitude reinstall linux-image-2.6.32-24-386
And bob’s yer uncle: all back working again.
