fraz wrote:
I am trying to install amd64 Etch using the beta 1 release installer onto an 80Gig USB 2.0 Hard Drive. It goes pretty well, the drive is picked up at /dev/sda and installs happilly.Unfortunately it won't boot, and the kernel prints this message: /sbin/init: 432: cannot open dev/console: No such file Kernel panic - not syncing: attempted to kill init!I don't know what's wrong. The computer can boot USB drives. But i'm booting using grub on a floppy to load the kernel. Could it be that it can't mount the filesystems properly?Thanks!
I eventually worked out it was because the initrd image was lacking the neccessary USB/UMS modules. May be worth adding an option somewhere to make this painless for others in the future. Following these hints fixed the problem:
http://lists.debian.org/debian-boot/2004/11/msg01601.html Briefly: With the usb drive mounted on /target start a shell (Alt-F2) and edit:# nano /target/etc/mkinitrd/modules to add sd_mod, ehci-hcd, uhci-hcd, ohci-hcd, usb-storage
# nano /target/etc/mkinitrd/mkinitrd.conf to add DELAY=10 (allows USB drive detection, I suspect lower values also work)
# chroot /target# mkinintrd -o /boot/initrd-<version> (follow hints to mount proc + try again)
Reboot and harrah! fraz