Arch Linux

svrmirac

Member

Registered: 2017-08-04

Posts: 15

[SOLVED]Syslinux.cfg "APPEND root=..." points to a non-linux partition

Hello,

I am close to the end of the process of switching from the standard partitioning scheme to an LVM scheme. I was following a guide Gilles posted here and referencing the LVM wiki. I am dual booting with windows and the partition table is MBR.

I've come to the point where, in the Wiki, it says "If the root file system resides in a logical volume, the 'root= kernel' parameter must be pointed to the mapped device, e.g '/dev/mapper/vg-name-lv-name'." Since that will be the case, I went to edit the "APPEND" entry in my syslinux.cfg and there found something that confused me. The current entry, for my working Arch system, is:

APPEND root=/dev/sda3 rw

This seems really strange to me because when installing Arch I made only two partitions, "/" (/dev/sda6) and "/home" (/dev/sda7). To the best of my knowledge, both kernel and root are on /dev/sda6.

This is what my disk looks like:

/dev/sda1             2048     196559     194512   95M  7 HPFS/NTFS/exFAT
/dev/sda2  *        196608  420650143  420453536   200.5G  7 HPFS/NTFS/exFAT
/dev/sda3        420653056  421574655     921600   450M 27 Hidden NTFS WinRE
/dev/sda4        421576641 1953513471 1531936831   730.5G  f W95 Ext'd (LBA)
/dev/sda5        421576704 1697495039 1275918336   608.4G  7 HPFS/NTFS/exFAT
/dev/sda6       1799899136 1831356415   31457280   15G 83 Linux
/dev/sda7       1831358464 1862141951   30783488   14.7G 83 Linux
/dev/sda8       1697497088 1799884799  102387712   48.8G 8e Linux LVM

Partition table entries are not in disk order.

*I got sda8 by shrinking sda5

The questios I have are:
1. why is "APPEND root=..." pointing to the windows recovery partition and how can Arch boot/work if that's so?
2. for the new scheme (I have cloned sda6 to "/dev/vgarch-root" and sda7 to "/dev/vgarch-home", on sda8), will the system boot properly if I edit the "APPEND root=..." line to point to "vgarch-root"?

Last edited by svrmirac (2017-08-18 19:36:17)

Lone_Wolf

Forum Moderator

From: Netherlands, Europe

Registered: 2005-10-04

Posts: 11,925

Re: [SOLVED]Syslinux.cfg "APPEND root=..." points to a non-linux partition

https://www.win.tue.nl/~aeb/partitions/ … pes-1.html

As you can see MBR type 27 has more uses .
Is this an acer / hp / dell  etc system, which windows version did it come with originally  ?

Post the output of lsblk -f please.

Last edited by Lone_Wolf (2017-08-18 13:03:17)

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WorMzy

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From: Scotland

Registered: 2010-06-16

Posts: 11,868

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Re: [SOLVED]Syslinux.cfg "APPEND root=..." points to a non-linux partition

/dev/sda3 is the default shipped by Arch: https://git.archlinux.org/svntogit/pack … s/syslinux

I would hazard a guess that you're not actually booting with syslinux, you just installed it at some point. Do you have any other bootloader on this system?

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svrmirac

Member

Registered: 2017-08-04

Posts: 15

Re: [SOLVED]Syslinux.cfg "APPEND root=..." points to a non-linux partition

Is this an acer / hp / dell  etc system, which windows version did it come with originally  ?

It's a mutt desktop I built, running win 10 and Arch.

Post the output of lsblk -f please.

NAME   FSTYPE  LABEL           UUID                                   MOUNTPOINT
sda                                                                   
├─sda1 ntfs    System Reserved 82691BE7152E40FA                       
├─sda2 ntfs    Ljevi           C22EAD6E2EAD5C63                       
├─sda3 ntfs                    36245A002459C411                       
├─sda4                                                                
├─sda5 ntfs    Desni           01D314DC465D0BE0                       
├─sda6 ext4                    68d8888d-f217-47db-b3a4-6a41b01a300b   /
├─sda7 ext4                    84b5c892-e9e4-412b-8157-75c8f3b09233   /home
└─sda8 LVM2_me                 g6rHkZ-r01o-fuai-dYUY-739J-15Tv-JqCEdn 
  ├─vgarch-root
  │    ext4                    68d8888d-f217-47db-b3a4-6a41b01a300b   
  └─vgarch-home
       ext4                    84b5c892-e9e4-412b-8157-75c8f3b09233   
sr0   

Do you have any other bootloader on this system?

Yes, GRUB2. In its .cfg, there's "set root='hd0,msdos6'", which appears to be pointing to the right location. Because I know I installed it as the bootloader, I guess that answers my questions.
That entry in the LVM wiki mislead me, together with the fact that I don't know what syslinux is or when I installed it.

Thank you for helping.

Last edited by svrmirac (2017-08-18 19:34:05)