pivot_root problem with replaced motherboard
On attempting to boot Debian sarge kernel 2.6.7-1-386, I am getting
the following (last 3 lines before halting):
pivot_root: No such file or directory
/sbin/init: 424: cannot open dev/console: No such file
Kernel panic: Attempted to kill init!
Background:
My Christmas present from Murphy was failure of the ps/2 keyboard port
on my motherboard (that situation was not at all fun). Up until that
time, my sarge installation had been working fine. While the
motherboard is gone for warranty repair, I have installed a little
less expensive spare motherboard from the same manufacturer. Both
have IDE and SATA ports to accomodate the two older IDE drives and
two newer SATA drives.
My boot is on the first SATA drive in its own partition. The rest of
my installation is in another partition on that drive. On the old
motherboard, this drive is recognized as hde (hde2 for boot, hde5 for
swap, and hde6 for the rest). I am using GRUB.
After installing the new motherboard, I encountered the above error
when attempting to boot. I had another Linux (Agnula) installation
on hdb3 (the 2nd IDE drive) and this booted OK. I ended up wiping
out this Agnula installation and re-installing Debian sarge (using
same install disk as before, a version around July 2004) on hdb3.
This re-install works fine.
Using the reinstalled version on hdb3, I found that hde2 and hde6 were
not recognized when trying to mount them ("/dev/hde6 is not a valid
block device"), but did find that they mount fine using /dev/sda2
and /dev/sda6.
I now have tried the following lines in the GRUB menu.lst file for the
old install attempt at booting:
title Old Debian sarge install
root (hd2,1)
kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.7.-1-386 root=/dev/sda6 ro
initrd /initrd.img-2.6.7-1-386
Same error as when I had "root=/dev/hde6 ro" in the 3rd line above,
which worked for my old motherboard. I have tried changing the hde
to sda and hdg to sdb designations in /etc/fstab also (although I
would guess that /etc/fstab is not being accessed/found).
Knoppix 3.4 shows the SATA drives as being hde and hdg and can be
mounted using those designations.
It appears to me from reading about pivot_root that hde6 (or sda6) is
not being found during the boot process.
I know I could go ahead and run with the newly installed copy on hdb3,
but it is a pain to do so much configuring of my system all over
again.
Can anyone give me some pointers? I've tried about every combination
I can think of.
Don
Reply to: