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So, today I thought I should update to 2.6.27 and the computer refuses to boot. I've been searching around here and tried everything I managed to find that seemed plausible, but to no avail.
First of all, I probably did a Bad Thing when I manually updated with "pacman -Sy kernel26", believing that it would understand what dependencies there were. This also resulted in an update of klibc-*, although those updates failed initially. After removing the asm-symlink it still complained on mknod. So I removed that, and reinstalled again. Everything looked fine. I didn't even forget to run lilo afterwards (yes, I use lilo, not grub). But when I rebooted the system didn't find mknod.
Ok, no big deal, I reboot with a CD (a backtrac2 live cd that for some reason aborts booting when it comes to USB devices, and thus gives me a shell that I can mess around in) since the other boot option didn't help, mount my system, chroot and reinstall the klibc packages. Then I reinstall the kernel and run lilo. Reboot. This time it doesn't complain on mknod. It does complain that it can't find /dev/hda1, which is kind of a problem. I've tried reconfiguring mkinitcpio but I can't seem to get the initramdisk to find my harddrive.
As a last resort I downloaded the latest core CD for arch, but I can't get it to boot either (there's something weird happening so it locks up when it calls the init scripts and the text on the screen is garbled). I get similar behaviour when I for instance try to install the kernel26 package found on the cd. So basically I'm completely out of ideas.
Any ideas of what I might be missing or how to solve the situation?
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Can you post your kernel .config file? That might shed some light on the situation.
Also, what is the error message that gets spat out when you boot up? I'm assuming it's a kernel panic of some sort?
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Actually, I have no idea how I should post the .config file, bar writing it manually... Anything in particular you would look for? I actually think it's stock, whatever it defaults to when installing the package, unless it copies your old .config from that kernel source directory.
The message is:
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...
Attempting to create root block device '/dev/hda1'
ERROR: Failed to parse block device name for '/dev/hda1'
unknown
ERROR: root fs cannot be detected. Try using the rootfstype= kernel parameter.
Waiting for devices to settle...done.
Root device '/dev/hda1' doesn't exist, attempting to create it
ERROR: Failed to parse block device name for '/dev/hda1'
ERROR: Unable to create/detect root device '/dev/hda1'
Dropping to a recovery shell... type 'exit' to reboot
<the rest of that message...>
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So to me it just looks like udev doesn't set up my hard drive. I've tried using only ide (no scsi or sata) in mkinitcpio.conf, booted with rootfstype=ext2 and ext3 (I don't remember which one of those I have, but the grub menu says it's ext2 when I use the arch boot CD). This makes a slight difference since the rows:
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Attempting to create root block device '/dev/hda1'
ERROR: Failed to parse block device name for '/dev/hda1'
unknown
ERROR: root fs cannot be detected. Try using the rootfstype= kernel parameter.
------
are replaced by
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:: Loading root filesystem module...ext3
------
instead (or whatever rootfstype I tell it to use).
I hope that made it a little bit clearer...
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Check to see if you have any of the CONFIG_PATA options set. I'm rather new to how Arch deals with the kernel updates, but it seems to favor PATA drivers for IDE stuff. If that's the case with you, then try setting your root=/dev/sda1 instead of root=/dev/hda1.
As to your question of ext2 vs ext3 - it's probably ext3, but (I think) since ext3 is backward compatible with ext2, the LiveCD mounts it as ext2.
EDIT: Alternately, I stumbled upon an interesting bug earlier today. If both IDE and PATA support are built in to the kernel, it seems that the init system freaks out and can't register partitions, causing a kernel panic.
Last edited by justinmc (2008-10-21 02:43:55)
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I will check that as soon as I get home from work. I specifically told mkinitcpio to use ide (just to try, since it didn't work first time around with pata), and configuring lilo for /dev/sda1 did not work at all. But maybe there's a difference if I give the root=/dev/sda1 argument at boot instead. The problem to me seems to be that udev does not create any hda or sda-devices, which seems similar to the bug you mention.
Thing is, I know I HAD ext3 at some point, but also noticed that it was a pain in the behind to have the root partition as ext3 since ext3 was not supported by default which at some point made me unable to access my system without wizardry. This was a while back and I'm not sure if I did a reinstall after that with the root partition being ext2 in order to avoid problems in the future, ironically... =P
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There, back home again. Currently everything PATA related seems to be compiled as modules. Same with IDE. So I guess the problem is that it never loads the right module for the controller. As of now I'm trying to find out exactly what controller I have (it's a Asus M2NPV-VM mobo), to see if it helps to stick that into MODULES in mkinitcpio.conf.
And the partition should still be ext3, since that's what it tells me when I mount the partition. I've already put ext3 into modules, but that didn't help either (should be covered by filesystems anyhow, right?).
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Quick Question - you're not getting any message with the available partitions, are you?
like
"Available Partitions: sda hda hdb"
It would be one device per line, and with some numbers, which, if I recall correctly, are indicative of the size of the disk.
If not, then that would probably confirm that the module for the controller isn't installed, since it would seem that init isn't seeing the disk at all.
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Not that I could see, but it could get lost somewhere in the output due to limited scrollback, but I doubt it. Anyhow, I gave up and reinstalled instead...
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