Arch Linux

killnine

Member

Registered: 2011-12-14

Posts: 62

[post pacman -syu] unable to determine major/minor number of root dev

Updated yesterday, powered up today and run into the below upon boot:

ERROR: Unable to determine major/minor number of root device '/dev/sda5'.
You are being dropped to a recovery shell
     Type 'exit' to try and continue booting
sh: cant access tty; job control turned off

I found and tried

To work around this problem:

        boot the Fallback kernel
        insert the 'sleep' hook in the HOOKS line of /etc/mkinitcpio.conf after the 'udev' hook like this:

HOOKS="base udev sleep autodetect pata scsi sata dmraid filesystems"

        rebuild the kernel image and reboot

have also tried https://bugs.archlinux.org/task/27385

fallback still works

BIOS SATA Operation = AHCI

// EDIT
now im getting pretty frustrated, after doing all of this same f'n results - https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=129562
--performed the downgade again, with no upgrade this time, and it is still failing...

so does this mean it is not the mirrorlist/kernel? It seems more like my initramfs??? help?

Also, when I downgrade kernel to any version, the only thing that looks error-ish is

modprobe: invalid option -- 'd'

And then I get BusyBox  modprobe usage
So I dont think the modules are getting built correctly, which may explain why initramfs can't grab sda5????

Last edited by killnine (2011-12-14 18:31:35)