Live CD

On Monday evening, just before calling it a night, I decided to attend to that little 'updates available my OpenSUSE 11.1 notebook. There were half a dozen updates, one of them being a kernel update, which doesn't happen too often.  A few minutes later, I rebooted, and got nothing but a text login. Couldn't start X or even reconfigure it.  Then I noticed that there was no networking, and only a small handful of modules loaded -- I looked at loaded modules to try to figure out why I wasn't getting networking, even via my wired Ethernet port. Something had gone wrong with the update, a process that normally causes me no grief at all.

I tried several things, then gave up for the night. Next morning, I went looking for the problem, hoping it wouldn't cut too deeply into my day. The kernel package had installed, but kernel-base wasn't there and neither was kernel-extras -- that kind of explained the problem with missing modules. Okay, can't get networked, can't transfer files via my USB memory stick, and can't do a lot of other things. Time for the old bootable CD trick. The first I got my hands on, ironically, was Mandriva 2008.1 which I had previously installed on this notebook and later erased to load up OpenSUSE 11.1.