Bug#420809: Bug: Installation-reports: init placed in /sbin/init but Grub looks for it as /init
On Tue, Apr 24, 2007 at 03:31:21PM -0700, David Warman wrote:
> >Well, grub certainly doesn't need you to manually specify the path
> >to init
> >in the general case. Did you add this boot option in /addition/ to
> >the
> >defaults, or /replacing/ them? If you replaced the default
> >options, that
> >at least suggests where to continue looking for the problem.
> At the boot menu, I pressed e to get into edit mode, selected the
> kernel line, pressed e again, and added 'init=/sbin/init' to the end
> of the line.
Ok.
> The kernel panic message suggested I set an init= option
> to the kernel to fix the problem. At first I thought it was an LBA
> mode problem, but it wasn't.
Well, that's not altogether clear to me.
> There were no dialogs in the installation sequence that mention where init
> should be.
Because it's not a configuration option.
> >What is the output leading up to this error message, when booting
> >without an init= option?
> something along the lines of "kernel panic: can't find /init. perhaps
> you need to add init= to to kernel".
I meant the lines before that one, actually. There are two separate points
in the boot sequence where the kernel will exec init; they may be
distinguishable by the error message itself, but I don't see either error
often enough to know for sure -- and in any case the preceding lines are
more likely to tell you why init wasn't found.
> However, I cannot reproduce it now as the kernel seems to be remembering
> /sbin/init (yes, it is still there, I just checked) without the boot
> option present.
The more likely explanation of this is that adding the init= option was
never relevant in the first place, and the actual problem you were having
with the boot was an intermittent one (such as a race condition initializing
the driver for your particular hard drive interface) or one that was
resolved by some other change you made (such as an issue with LBA access).
> I suppose the savedefault command saved the location;
No, savedefault doesn't do this.
> In fact I do not see where such info might be stored, but the fact is the
> system now boots reliably without the init= option, which I only entered
> once.
Suggesting that the real problem was with grub being able to reliably load
the initramfs from disk, and that some other change you made to the disk
config corrected this problem.
--
Steve Langasek Give me a lever long enough and a Free OS
Debian Developer to set it on, and I can move the world.
vorlon@debian.org http://www.debian.org/
Reply to: