[clug] Fedora 3 security update kills Linux install

[david howe]

Pearl Louis wrote:

>Well, just as the title says.  About 10 minutes ago I boot into Fedora
>3.  Like a good little girl I go, "Well, what about security updates?"
> I run "yum update" and see *one* security update (for
>selinux-policy-target I think).  Everything is running fine at this
>point and has been for months.  Everything was running fine minutes
>*before* I applied the security update.  No problems.  I install the
>update.  Immediately after the update, everything goes to hell, quite
>literally.  Everytime I try to run a program e.g. Matlab, Firefox I
>get an error message similar to:
>
>"error while loading shared libraries:/lib/tls/libc.so.6: cannot apply
>additional memory protection after relocation: Permission denied."
>
>OK, maybe selinux did something to my computer.  Reboot (yes, Windows
>mentality).  Reboot fails giving me the same error message as above. 
>I manually switch the machine on and off.  Go pass grub, it starts
>uncompressing the kernel, then something about an audit comes up and
>suddenly I get the error message above with the additional line,
>
>"Kernel panic - not syncing: Attempted to kill init."
>
>Wow, I never thought a simple security update can quite literally kill
>a Linux installation like this.  I've been using Linux for a couple of
>years now (mostly Mandrake) and this has never happened before. 
>Actually this has never happened with any security update I've applied
>for anything before e.g. Windows.  I expect a bit of flakiness every
>now and then or maybe some programs to stop working at worse which
>will then require a few hours of swearing and troubleshooting but
>actually *killing* the entire installation?  This has definitely put
>me off Fedora bigtime.  I can't even apply a simple security update
>without worrying about doing backups in case my entire Linux
>installation goes poof.
>
>Ah well, before I wipe Fedora off as a very bad experience, does
>anyone have any idea how to potentially fix this problem?  Or at least
>save my data?
>
>Pearl
>  
>
Well you might be able to boot with another device (cdrom) and then 
chroot on to your old drive, maybe running fsck first....

if you then bring up a network device you can dump your data or cp it 
onto another partition (you did run multiple partitions didnt you?)

just a thought

david