strange booting behavior
please tell me if any further information is needed.
i am running wheezy and i want to upgrade to jessie. i
can't do that until i have an immediately-usable backup
drive booting properly. in my case, this means the same
environment (not a rescue cd).
for my second drive i will happily boot from either my new
internal toshiba or my thumb drive. i don't care which one.
everything boots ok on my main internal drive. the computer
runs bios and i formatted all disks to use mbr. i don't use
lvm or raid.
i tried getting both the toshiba and the thumb drive to
boot. to make each drive boot, i formatted as follows: ext2
for boot and luks with ext4 on root. for example, on
toshiba, i have /boot on /dev/sda1 and /root on /dev/sda3.
i copied to root and to boot, confirmed that the copy was
perfect (using separate unix tools), edited the target's
crypttab and fstab (to set uuid and /dev/mapper/name, confirmed all of
the uuids etc.,
prepared a chroot (proc, sys, dev), entered the chroot, and
ran "update-initramfs -u -k all; update-grub;
dpkg-reconfigure grub-pc". i got no errors. i selected the
drive, not a partition, for the boot device. (i was told
that that dpkg-reconfigure runs grub-install and is the
better option in this case because an upgrade could screw
everything up otherwise.)
both drives did not boot correctly, but in different ways.
the thumb drive is quick to describe. it's in the bios boot
sequence, but even though i put grub on it, it doesn't boot.
it just defaults to the next item on the sequence. so
perhaps my computer is not capable of booting thumb drive?
the rest of this email will be about my new toshiba internal
drive, which DOES run grub, but does not boot correctly.
grub comes up, i select the default debian version. the
kernel loads and starts doing things for 7 seconds.
(by the way, i was able to notice that around 4 seconds, in
among a whole bunch of usb messages, it says something like
"waiting for encrypted source device...". but there are too
many usb messages and scrolling does not work well so i
could not determine whether that sequence continued.)
then booting does nothing until 64 seconds. the last boot
messages before this were attaching hard drives (it attached
sda sdb sdc i think; sdc is merely an external usb device).
then two lines saying USB disconnect, device number #.
then more messages.
then drops into a shell, initramfs. the error message is
roughly like the following (transcribed manually, "..." not
in the original).
Check cryptopts=source= bootarg:cat/proc/command line or
missing modules, device:cat/proc/modules ls/dev
-r ALERT! /dev/disk/by-uuid/a89...32 does not exist
dropping to a shell!
i do not understand this error message. what does -r mean? that partition
exists. the uuid refers to /dev/sda3 (the raw partition that
contains encrypted root).
in fact, in the initrd busybox shell, i can do cryptsetup
luksOpen /dev/sda3 toshiba-root. i do not know how or where
to mount it, however. mounting it on / not work.
that seems to suggest that it exists, in contrast to the error message.
strangely, despite having dropped into an initramfs shell,
the kernel keeps spewing USB messages every 30 seconds or
so. these start with usb disconnect, then new usb device
and it mentions my mouses and stuff. i have to clear the
screen each time.
/proc/cmdline says
BOOT_IMAGE=/vmlinuz-3.2.0-4-amd64 root=/dev/mapper/toshibaroot ro
too many modules to transcribe, but include dm-crypt and dm-mod.
i would be very grateful for any help.
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