Bug#571035: [squeeze alpha1] installationsreport: grub2: machine doesn't boot

[Holger Wansing <linux@wansing-online.de>]

[CC'ing the initramfs-tools maintainers]

Hello,

Frans Pop <elendil@planet.nl> wrote:
> On Saturday 27 February 2010, Holger Wansing wrote:
> > When I boot and that booting fails, I'm not dropped to a debug shell.
> > System simply stopps.
> 
> OK. That means that the initramfs scripts think they *have* found the root 
> FS and that it has been mounted, but that the kernel thinks differently.
> 
> To investigate the problem, please see the initramfs-tools man page, 
> especially the 'debug' and 'break' options. The last allows you to force 
> the initramfs into a debug shell at various points. Try 'break=bottom' and 
> check what the status of the system is at that point.
> 
> Note: probably the initramfs-tools maintainer can help you better with this 
> issue.

The hole story in short words:

I did a test installation with the debian-installer version squeeze-alpha1 on
an old Toshiba Satellite 320CDS laptop with an 486 cpu and 32MB of ram.

Installation went without any problems so far.

The only problem now is: the system does not boot. Output on screen is:

	Booting Debian GNU/Linux with 2.6.32-trunk-486
	Loading Linux 2.6.32-trunk-486 ...
	Loading initial ramdisk ...

	[New screen appears]
	Decompressing Linux... Parsing ELF... done.
	Booting the kernel.

and then the system stopps. The cursor is blinking in the next line for ever.





I tried to get additional infos via the initramfs debug shell (thanks to frans pop for
the hint), but I cannot get the shell: I tried all the break=xxx kernel parameters, 
none of them gives me a shell.

I used this grub2 menu entry (with all variants for break= ):

	insmod ext2
	set root: (hd0,1)
	echo Loading Linux 2.6.32-trunk-486 ...
	linux /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.32-trunk-486 root=/dev/hda1 ro all_generic_ide break=top
	echo Loading initial ramdisk ...
	initrd /boot/initrd.img-2.6.32-trunk-486

I also used this menu entry (which uses UUID as hd device identifier) with the same result:

	insmod ext2
	set root: (hd0,1)
	echo Loading Linux 2.6.32-trunk-486 ...
	linux /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.32-trunk-486 root=UUID=[UUID] ro all_generic_ide break=top
	echo Loading initial ramdisk ...
	initrd /boot/initrd.img-2.6.32-trunk-486

The same happens with the debug=vc kernel parameter: no additional output, the same as
mentioned above.


I would be great, if someone could help me out here.

Greetings
Holger

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