Arch Linux

BaptN

Member

Registered: 2014-07-17

Posts: 2

[SOLVED]Problem booting fresh VM, unable to find root device /dev/sda3

Hello Archers, please accept my apologies for poor english

I'm getting stuck on a very weird behavior when installing a fresh Arch distrib on a VirtualBox VM.

Both selecting normal boot or fallback image (syslinux as a bootloader), the boot fail very early, with the following log :

...
:: running hook [udev]
:: Triggering uevents...
Waiting 10 seconds for device /dev/sda3
ERROR: device `/dev/sda3`not found. Skipping fsck.
ERROR: Unable to find root device `/dev/sda3`.
You are being dropped to a recovery shell
  Type èxit`to try and continue booting
sh: can't access tty: job control turned off
[rootfs /]#

Here is my setup :
- VirtualBox running from Windows 8
- 1 single hard driver mounted
- 1gb ram, 1 core proc and whatever
- Fresh install of Arch, I think I followed the install guide pretty straightforward
- 1 single partition on /dev/sda, so I don't even know where this /dev/sda3 come from
- This is my second try before posting here, in my first attempt I created a  VM with the exact same setup, still following the install guide, only difference in partitioning, I had /dev/sda1 for boot and /dev/sda2 for /, I ended up with the exact same situation => the "3" in /dev/sda3 seems completely irrelevant of the partition table !

Other point, after the error message I posted, and from the prompt I get access to, I still can manually type

# mount /dev/sda1 new_root
# mount /dev/sda1 root

Followed by <Ctrl-D> twice, and my system boot normally !

I did a lot of tries, starting by a lot of pacman -Syu linux , mkinitcpio , syslinux reinstall .... Still end up with the same error

Does anybody encounter the same situation ?
I'm really not advanced kernel user, I'd love to be able to get some information relevant to this issue

Thanks by advance,

Bapt.

Last edited by BaptN (2014-07-19 17:16:36)

falconindy

Developer

From: New York, USA

Registered: 2009-10-22

Posts: 4,111

Website

Re: [SOLVED]Problem booting fresh VM, unable to find root device /dev/sda3

- 1 single partition on /dev/sda, so I don't even know where this /dev/sda3 come from

From your bootloader config. You probably never changed this from the default, which is /dev/sda3.

---

blog | ±github

BaptN

Member

Registered: 2014-07-17

Posts: 2

Re: [SOLVED]Problem booting fresh VM, unable to find root device /dev/sda3

Damn, I was convinced that this config was generated dynamically from fstab, or something ...

Works like a charm with /dev/sda1 in syslinux.cfg, thanks for pointing !