Re: Error rebooting after upgrade from 2.6.12-i36 to 2.6.15-i686

[Chris Lale <chrislale@untrammelled.co.uk>]

Arnau Rebassa Villalonga wrote:

> Hi all,
>
>   I've installed a new Dell poweredge 850 server with SCSCI disks 
> formated as ext3 from a netinstall, it run smoothly and installed the 
> 2.6.12-i386 kernel image. After the aptitude dist-upgrade, I upgraded 
> the linux-image to the 2.6.15-686 and also to 2.6.15-686-smp (having 
> with both the same result) and when I reboot the machine it displays 
> the following errors:
>
>   Alert! /dev/sda1 does not exist. Dropping to a shell!
>
>   /bin/sh: can't access tty; job control turned off
>
> and a busybox shell appears. Anybody knows how to fix this?
>
> Regards

Try run level 1. I had a problem upgrading from kernel-image-2.6.8 to 
linux-image-2.6.15-1-686 in Etch. The image was only half installed. I 
could not boot normally, but I could boot from Grub in recovery mode 
(run level 1). After supplying the root password for maintenance, I 
tried to install again. apt-get failed at first, but suggested

apt-get -f install

This did the trick. (I have found that apt-get will work even when 
aptitude occasionally gets confused - perhaps that helped too.)

Hth,
Chris.