Arch Linux

dspahn

Member

Registered: 2007-09-17

Posts: 10

[Solved] Can't boot on old laptop

I have a Toshiba Portege 3490CT, 700MHz, 128MB RAM.
I have been sampling different distros on it, and so far, Arch is the best.
The only problem I have is that I can't boot. When I try, the kernel loads, the framebuffer initializes, and everything looks fine and dandy, until it tries to mount the root partition.

My current menu.lst entry looks like this:
title Arch Linux
root (hd0,0)
kernel /vmlinuz26 root=/dev/sda3 ro vga=773
initrd /kernel26.img

The error says:
kinit: cannot open root device sda3(8,3)
kinit: init not found!
kernel panic- not syncing- Attempted to kill init!

The computer has a single IDE hard drive and a pcmcia CDROM. I have reinstalled the distribution twice today, the first time trimming back seemingly unnecessary hooks, and the second by adding things I though necessary (ext3, ide_disk, etc.) When I boot from the distro CD, I am able to mount the hard drive as /dev/sda3. I checked fstab, and it's correct also. Where else should I look?
I have used Gentoo alot, as well as Sabayon, Ubuntu, Fedora, and SUSE. According to what I have learned of linux from those distro's, the system should boot. What have I missed?

Thanks!

Update: I tried Failback mode and it booted. This doesn't really help because it doesn't solve the problem. Where should I look for a solution?

I dug a little deeper and found that the only difference between the Arch Linux item and the failback item is the initrd that's used. How do I determine the difference between the two (Like, how do I figure out which modules are being loaded in the initrd?)

Last edited by dspahn (2007-09-17 20:01:04)

low

Member

Registered: 2007-07-04

Posts: 109

Re: [Solved] Can't boot on old laptop

ftp://ftp.archlinux.org/iso/2007.08.1/Known-Issues.txt

dspahn

Member

Registered: 2007-09-17

Posts: 10

Re: [Solved] Can't boot on old laptop

You got me!
I found that answer about 5 minutes ago. I'll [solve] the thread once I get a successful boot.