How to repair unbootable Fedora install

Posted by Cerin on Server Fault See other posts from Server Fault or by Cerin
Published on 2012-06-19T17:53:16Z Indexed on 2012/06/19 21:18 UTC
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linux

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fedora

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yum

How do you repair/reinstall Fedora without deleting any existing partitions or data?

I was attempting to upgrade some old Fedora 13 servers to 17, following the instructions in the wiki. After the 14->15 upgrade, rebooting resulted in the output:

Dropping to debug shell.

sh: can't access tty; job control turned off
dracut:/#

Running dmesg also shows:

dracut Warning: No root device "block:/dev/mapper/VolGroup-lv_root" found

Googling shows this error is typically related to some weird RAID issues, but my server is a virtual machine not using any RAID. Using a rescue CD, I can chroot /mnt/sysimage, and all packages and data still seems to be there. How do I make the system bootable again?

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