Re: debian 6.0 boot failure after update to grub2
Excerpts from Philipp Überbacher's message of 2011-06-26 04:38:27 +0200:
> Excerpts from lee's message of 2011-06-25 22:40:59 +0200:
> > Philipp Überbacher <hollunder@lavabit.com> writes:
> >
> > > Excerpts from lee's message of 2011-06-25 20:06:48 +0200:
> > >> Philipp Überbacher <hollunder@lavabit.com> writes:
> > >>
> > >> > The system waits for the root file system for a while and then
> > >> > drops into a shell with the (initramfs) prompt.
> > >> >
> > >> > There's no /dev/sd* or /dev/disk for some reason.
> > >>
> > >> A few weeks ago I found that I was suddenly unable to boot a
> > >> self-compiled kernel after making a change to only one option which
> > >> wouldn't affect booting at all. The kernel couldn't find the root fs
> > >> and after some waiting put me into an emergency shell. Apparently the
> > >> lvm volumes the root fs resides on were unavailable for unknown
> > >> reasons.
> > >>
> > >> Fortunately, kernels from Debian packages still boot. I haven't found
> > >> a solution other than to run stock kernels yet. The only thing I
> > >> could find out is that it eventually has something to do with the
> > >> initramfs not being built correctly by the update-initramfs tool.
> > >
> > > Thanks lee, I think I saw a bug report regarding your
> > > problem. However, in my case no LVM is involved. Could it be that the
> > > initramfs is messed up for some reason?
> >
> > The initramfs image for a particular kernel comes in a Debian package
> > with the kernel, doesn't it? If generating the images were to produce
> > broken images, wouldn't there be quite a few people having similar
> > problems? I really don't know ...
> >
> > What if you install a more recent kernel from a rescue system?
>
> I managed to install the normal most recent kernel (.32-5) by chroot
> and it doesn't boot either. In addition I uninstalled mdadm to make sure
> it's not the cause of those issues, yet no luck, it fails at
> init-bottom because it doesn't manage to mount root.
> Could it be that grub2 can't handle a jfs root? I'm pretty much out of
> ideas. I'll try downgrading to grub1 tomorrow..
Well, after downgrading to grub1 the system still doesn't boot, so it
seems like grub2 was the trigger but isn't the problem.
The normal kernel and removal of mdadm should pretty much rule xen and
mdadm out as well, so what's left? Udev? Something else?
I tried manual mounting from busybox:
mount /dev/sda1 /root
fails with Invalid Argument
mount -t jfs /dev/sda1 /root
fails with No such device
So this is what happens during boot as well. I found a post suggesting
that it might be a missing driver because the device is there. I tried
modprobing a couple of modules in busybox, but nothing I tried helped.
initramfs.conf is set to most and I rebuilt it a couple of times.
Ideas please?
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