Re: unable to open initial console (was: rescue grub -- help!)
On 3/24/06, David Liontooth <liontooth@cogweb.net> wrote:
> Hi Török,
>
> Thank you, that's very helpful. I ended up just installing a new Debian
> on a different partition; once that was done, the installer agreed to
> rewrite the MBR, and my old installation showed up in grub. I would much
> prefer being allowed to rewrite the MBR without first having to install
> another OS.
>
> Once I got that far, I could boot into the OS I'm trying to rescue;
> however, I now ran into the dreaded "warning: unable to open initial
> console". This is also /dev/ related, and this suggests I have a general
> dev problem with the partition I cloned. Now that I have a parallel
> partition that is fully operational, is there a way I can repopulate my
> /dev directory from chroot, or through a script?
Yes, boot from the CD, and copy /dev from the working installation to
the one you are trying to rescue.
You have a tmpfs mounted on /dev, that is handled by udev. You can try
to copy the needed devices from there, but I never tried doing that.
Try doing this inside the chroot:
# mknod /dev/null c 1 3
# mknod /dev/console c 5 1
Can you tell me how do you boot your kernel? Do you use initrd?
If not, you should, since that should solve this /dev problem you are having.
Which Debian distro are you using? Sarge, etch?
>
> Using "mount -o bind /dev /root2/dev", I can now chroot into /root2 and
> see I have a complete /dev directory, so that for instance I can mount
> /dev/hda1 on a chrooted /boot. How do I make this happen when I boot
> directly into that partition?
Please provide the output of these commands:
ls -l /root2/dev
cat /boot/grub/menu.lst
Make sure your initrd is ok (i.e. is not corrupt), make sure your udev
installation is ok.
Try reinstalling udev, and regenerating the initrd, and see if that helps.
Edwin
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