Arch Linux

Epicanis

Member

Registered: 2011-07-21

Posts: 11

[SOLVED] (another) "root mounted but /sbin/init not found" situation

My situation looks different from the other ones I'm finding by searching, which are mostly "mounting the wrong partition" sorts of errors.

In my case - I installed via arch-bootstrap.sh after manually partitioning and formatting. It's an old BIOS-based device and I'm just using plain old GRUB2 as the bootloader.

What I am/was seeing is that it would boot and die with the aforementioned "root mounted but /sbin/init does not exist" message.  If I edit the boot line to include "init=/lib/systemd/systemd", however, it boots fine.  I *did* create a symbolic link from /sbin/init to /lib/systemd/systemd (and confirmed its existence and that it does really point to the systemd binary), and reinstalled the linux (kernel) package and re-did the grub2 install just to make sure, but I still get the error unless I explicitly specify "init=/lib/systemd/systemd".

I've got it booting for now by adding this to grub.cfg so I'm functioning at the moment - I'm just wondering what I missed (or is it normal to have to do this?)  Any hints? What does it take to get grub2 to recognize the existing /sbin/init?

Last edited by Epicanis (2016-01-22 22:15:34)

Scimmia

Fellow

Registered: 2012-09-01

Posts: 12,418

Re: [SOLVED] (another) "root mounted but /sbin/init not found" situation

First off, /sbin should be a symlink to usr/bin. Is that the case?

Did you install systemd-sysvcompat? It's part of the base group.

Epicanis

Member

Registered: 2011-07-21

Posts: 11

Re: [SOLVED] (another) "root mounted but /sbin/init not found" situation

Yes, /sbin is a symlink to /usr/bin. I did not explicitly install systemd-sysvcompat, however. Is that actually necessary for booting (without specifying "init=/lib/systemd/systemd")? I did manually create the link from /sbin/init to /lib/systemd/systemd ( also shows up in "/usr/bin/init" where it really belongs... ).

Hmmm... I just noticed on a machine that DOES have systemd-sysvcompat installed that the symlink is to a relative location ("../lib/systemd/systemd") rather than absolute ("/lib/systemd/systemd").  I'll try changing my manual link to match and see what happens.

Epicanis

Member

Registered: 2011-07-21

Posts: 11

Re: [SOLVED] (another) "root mounted but /sbin/init not found" situation

...and that was it, it seems.

For anyone else who runs into this problem in the future: looks like grub may be doing everything from "/new_root/(whatever)", so the link has to have a relative path to actually be pointing where grub is looking for it.

Thanks for the pointer to the right answer! (Not I need to figure out how to tag the thread "solved"...)