Intrepid to Jaunty upgrade inird creation failure and how to recover

[Josh Fuller]

Just in case any of you run into this problem...

I just finished upgrading an intrepid server to jaunty and ran into a  
potentially catastrophic yaird failure
during the upgrade. If I had not been paying attention to the apt-get  
warnings and rebooted the server after
the upgrade I would have ended up with a boot failure as the ramdisk  
for boot can't be generated!

The error looks like this:

	Setting up linux-image-2.6.28-11-server (2.6.28-11.42) ...
	Running depmod.
	yaird error: bad device link in /sys/block/cciss!c0d0 (fatal)
	*Failed to create initrd image.*

Basically what Failed to create initrd image means is that the initial  
ramdisk, a temporary file system commonly
used in the boot process of the Linux kernel didn't get created. An  
initrd is used for making preparations before
the real root file system can be mounted. If you reboot without one of  
these things you've created a paperweight.

Luckily, it's not too hard to get around this error!

First...

	vi /etc/kernel-img.conf
and change

	ramdisk = /usr/sbin/mkinitrd.yaird
to

	#ramdisk = /usr/sbin/mkinitrd.yaird
and then save the file.

you should be able to

	apt-get install -f
and recover a failed upgrade.

It might be a good idea to do an

	update-grub
and

	update-initramfs -u
before rebooting just to be on the safe side if you're not 100% sure  
the initrd got built correctly.

This doesn't fix the bad device link error but will keep you up and  
running to get that all sorted out.

Anyone have any ideas on how to fix bad device links in /sys that  
actually causes this problem?

Thanks,
Josh