Problem moving to 2.6.12
I have an elderly machine which I use as a sacrificial machine and update
every morning to the latest unstable. That way I know when it is sensible
to update other machines.
But I have a problem updating it to 2.6.12. It has been running 2.6.11 for
a while, quite happily. But I wanted to move to 2.6.12 so I installed the new
kernel package and tried to boot it.
I can not see the early messages (there were some and what I saw of them
as they wizzed past on the screen looked OK), but it ends up complaining
that modprobe could not find /lib/modules/2.6.12-1-396/modules.dep which
is a file that I know exists and looks correct (its not zero length or the
like). Then it says "pivot_root: No such file or directory" and at /sbin/init
432: cannot open dev/console: No such file.
The disk it is booting (the same one as for 2.6.11) is a SCSI device, /dev/sdb
and it is driven by an Adaptec AHA-2940. So I suppose it is possible that
support for this device has not been built into the kernel or that it has
not been included in the initrd. The other thing about this machine is that
it is an MCA machine. Now the MCA stuff on this machine has not worked
for a long time (linux does not seem able to get the card IDs) but there are
no MCA cards installed, they are all PCI, including the Adaptec card.
Given that it does not seem able to find the hard drive of course none
of the console has been written to disk. I suppose I might be able to
persuade it to write to a serial port and record it using minicom.
Any ideas as to how to debug this?
David
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