On Thu, Oct 25, 2007 at 04:17:33PM -0300, Cassiano Bertol Leal wrote: > Hi > > I am trying to make a smooth transition fom windows to Debian in my work PC. :) > > I needed to be sure that not having win on this machine wouldn't affect > my work, since unfortunatelly we use many windows-based applications. > For that, I thought of first installing a proof-of-concept Debian inside > a VM. This way, I could go on installing Debian and all the tools I > needed without having to break my workflow. > > Since I wanted to make the move from MS to freedom, before I started > with the adventure, I freed space in my HD and told the VM to use my > physical disk instead of creating a virtual one. At the moment, I have a > fully working Debian Lenny that runs smoothly inside the VM. > > The current situation is as follows: > > When I boot the PC, I am presented with a GRUB menu with three options: > Debian's stock kernel, the same kernel but single-user, and Windows. > Currently, I am only able to boot Windows. After doing that, When I boot > the VM, I get the same GRUB menu and can boot Debian without a problem. the path to the root partition is different depending on whether you are in the VM or not. Probably its one of two things: 1. a driver issue. the drivers needed to boot in the VM don't work on the actual hardware but since the initrd was built inside the VM, the actual hardware drivers aren't present and it can't boot or 2. the devices are named differently depending on whether you're in the VM or the actual hardware resulting in the kernel looking in the wrong place to mount the root file system. > > The problem is when I want to boot Debian directly on the PC and not > inside the VM. The boot process starts normally, but then hangs. The > last lines that appear in the boot are: > > Begin: Mounting root file system... ... > Begin: Running /scripts/local-top ... > Done. > Begin: Waiting for root file system... ... > > And from there, I can only Control-Alt-Delete or do a cold reset. actually, from there you can *wait* and it should drop you to a busybox shell. it takes a few minutes before it gives up. (this assumes busybox is built into your initrd. I think that's the default). from there you can poke around and see what there is too see. look at the contents of $ROOT (echo $ROOT) to see where it thinks root should be located. look in /dev and see what partitions are available and see if they match up. you *might* be able to just reset $ROOT to the right partition, exit, and carry on with the boot. I suspect its the second of the two problems and you simply need to develop two boots stanzas for debian, one for the VM and one for the hardware. then you just choose the one you need. A
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