I've had my share of problem with linux
installations before, but the worst are always on my laptop. I did an
update using Fedora's new updating tool dnf, and I kept getting
scriptlet failures. This was ok after a couple of man pages and
rebuilding the rpm data base all was good, at least I thought. I
didn't realize anything was a miss until my GUI stopped functioning.
So, after a little frustration with no keyboard or mouse, I got to
the laptop reboot.
As the laptop came backup, it got
stuck on mounting the LUKS partitions. See all my partitions are
encrypted besides /boot and /boot/efi. So, no /, no /home, no /var
and no swap, nothing was mounting. I pulled out my cell phone and
started searching the net for possible solutions. The updates with
the scriptlets not running was cause by a miss configured SELinux I
found. I found nothing that related to my problem, but I did find a
similar description of the situation dealing with thin LVM
installations. The work around was to boot the machine with a cd
mount the file system and chroot it.
chroot /mnt/sysimage/ /bin/bash, then
run dracut -f, exit and reboot. SELinux would have to relabel the
partitions and all would be as good as new. Not!
The reason this problem existed was
because dracut was never able to update the initramfs with the
scriptlet that never ran. Second, dracut if you don't specify the
kernel you want the initramfs build for, dracut will build it for the
running one.
Yes, you guessed it first time around, the initramfs was
built for the kernel on the install dvd for Fedora 20. After more man
pages, and pulling what little hair I have left out, I found the
answer. It is “dracut –kver (kernel version) –force”. The
command will build the correct initramfs and since it's forced, you
will not get any warnings about over writing the old one.
